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Glimpses of California
and the Missions

HELEN HUNT JACKSON

/■_■
Author of **Ramona',*' etc.

With Illustrations by
HENRY SANDHAM

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, ^ COMPANY

1907

J/3

Ths Eastern Press Company
BosTOir, Mass.

NOTE

The papers on California and the Missions, by the
author of ^'Ramona," which are included in this
volume were first, published in 1883, and afterwards
reprinted with some European travel sketches in
1886, the volume bearing the title of " Glimpses
of Three Coasts." It has been frequently suggested
that the California articles should be published in a
separate volume, and they now reappear with illus-
trations by Henry Sandham, who visited California
with Mrs. Jackson when she was accumulating mate-
rial for " Ramona." Mrs. Jackson's descriptions and
the artist's illustrations now possess a special interest
from the fact that the restorations of late years have
materially altered the Mission buildings and other
places here pictured and described.

CONTENTS

Paob

Father Junipero and his Work 1

The Present Condition of the Mission Indians in
Southern California . 103

Echoes in the City op the Angels 161

Outdoor Industries in Southern California . .211

Chance Days in Oregon 259

ILLUSTRATIONS

From Drawings by Henry Sandbam

San Carlos Mission Frontispiece

Father Junipero Serra Page 5 ,

Santa Ynez Mission 11

Bells of the San Gabriel Mission 18

Indian Booth at Pachunga, where Mass is celebrated . . 23

San Antonio Mission 29

Old Mill bnilt by Indians at San Antonio 32

Funeral of Father Junipero 39

Interior of San Carlos Mission, showing Original Spring of

Roof and Curve of Walls 45

Bell-post and Corridor at San Miguel Mission 49

A Capacious Fireplace — San Luis Rey 58

' Church and Fountain, Santa Barbara 61

In the Mission Garden, San Juan Bautista 67

Interior of La Purissima Mission 74

Church and Graveyard of San Luis Rey 81

Old Door and Corridor Arches, San Juan 86

At Santa Barbara Mission 89

San Juan Bautista 95

Old Squaw Weaving Baskets 107

Old Mission Indian, aud Ruins of Mission. Saa Juan

Capistrano Ill

Tndian Carts and Houses. Rincon Mission 117

Indian Interior, Rincon 128

Woven Granaries • 128

xii Illustrations

Indiao Wonuui Pagt

The CaU to SnnriBe Maas, Pais

Latura, Hud to be 102 years of age. BenjainiDa, 117 years

Dove-cote. Kncon Mission

Mass for the Dead, Pala

The Burial of a Founder

The Old Mexican Woman

A Street in Los Angeles

Copj of a F^e from a Register of Branded Cattle . . .

A Veranda in Los Angeles 2(

Mountain Irrigation 21

Head Gate of Irrigating Ditch 2i

Wind Break of Eucalyptus Trees to protect Orchards . . 21
B^ging Wool for Transportation 24

FATHER JUNIPERO AND HIS WORK

Glimpses of California

FATHER JUNIPERO AND HIS

WORK

A SKETCH OF THE FOUNDATION, PROSPERITY, AND
RUIN OF THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS IN CALIFORNIA

During the years when Saint Francis went up and
down the streets of Assisi, carrying in his delicate un-
used hands the stones for rebuilding St. Damiano, he
is said to have been continually singing psalms,
breaking forth into ejaculations of gratitude ; his face
beaming as that of one who saw visions of unspeak-
able delight. How much of the spirit or. instinct of
prophecy there might have been in his exultant joy,
only he himself knew ; but it would have been
strange if there had not been vouchsafed to him at
least a partial revelation of the splendid results which
must of necessity follow the carrying out, in the
world, of the divine impulses which had blazed up in
his soul like a fire. As Columbus, from the trend of
imperfectly known shores and tides, from the myste-
rious indications of vague untracked winds, could de-
duce the glorious certainty of hitherto undreamed

4 Glimpses of California

continents of westward land, so might the ardent
spiritual discoverer see with inextinguishable faith
the hitherto undreamed heights which must be surely
reached and won by the path he pointed out. It is
certain that very early in his career he had the pur-
pose of founding an order whose members, being un-
selfish in life, should be fit heralds of God and mighty
helpers of men. The absoluteness of self-renuncia- (

tion which he inculcated and demanded startled even ]

the thirteenth century's standard of religious devotion. {

Cardinals and pope alike doubted its being within the ]

pale of human possibility ; and it was not until after j

much entreaty that the Church gave its sanction to j

the " Seraphic Saint's " band of " Fratri Minores," * '

and the organized work of the Franciscan Order
began. This was in 1208. From then till now, the <(

Franciscans have been, in the literal sense of the •

word, benefactors of men. Other of the orders in the
Catholic Church have won more distinction, in the
way of learning, political power, marvellous suffering
of penances and deprivation; but the record of the
Franciscans is in the main a record of lives and work, 1

like the life and work of their founder ; of whom a
Protestant biographer has written: "So far as can
be made out, he thought little of himself, even of his
own soul to be saved, all his life. The trouble had
been on his mind how suflBciently to work for God
and to help men."

Under the head of helping men, come all enter-
prises of discovery, development, and civilization

6 Glimpses of California

promise and wondrouB development on the Cali-
fornia coast to-day, Franciscaa friars were the fii'st
founders.

In the Franciscan College at Santa Barbara is a
daguerreotype, taken from an old portrait which was
painted more than a hundred years ago, at the College
of San Fernando, in Mexico. The face is one, once
seen, never to be forgotten ; fidl of spirituality and
tenderness and uiiutteiuble pathos; the mouth and
chin so dehcately sensitive that one marvels how such
a soul could have been capable of heroic endurance
of hardship ; the forehead and eyes strong, and radiant
with quenchless purpose, but filled with that solemn,
yearning, almost superhuman sadness, which has in
all time been the sign aud seal on the faces of men
born to die for the sake o£ their fellows. It is the
face of Father Junipero Serra, the first founder of
Franciscan missions in South California. Studying
the lineaments of this countenance, one recalls the
earhest authentic portrait of Saint Francis, — the one
painted by Pisano, which hangs in the sacristy of the
Assisi church. There seems a notable likeness be-
tween the two faces : the small and delicate features,
the broad forehead, and the expression of great gentle-
ness are the same in both. But the saint had a joy-
ousness which his illustrious foUower never knew.
The gayety of the troubadour melodies wMch Francis
sung all through his youth never left his soul : but
Serra's first and only songs were the solemn chants
of the Church; his first lessons were received in a

Father Junipero and his IVork 7

convent ; his earliest desire and hope was to become
a priest.

Serra was born of lowly people in the island of
Majorca, and while he was yet a little cliild sang as
chorister in the convent of San Bernardino. He was
but sixteen when he entered the Franciscan Order,
and before he was eighteen he had taken the final
vows. This was in the year 1730. His baptismal
name, Michael Joseph, he laid aside on becoming a
monk, and took the name of Junipero, after that
quaintest and drollest of all Saint Francis's first com-
panions; him of whom the saint said jocosely,
*' Would that I had a whole forest of such Junipers ! "

Studying in the Majorca Convent at the same time
with Serra, were three other young monks, beloved
and intimate companions of his, — Palou, Verger,
and Crespf. The friendship thus early begun never
waned; and the hearty and loving co-operation of
the four had much to do with the success of the great
enterprises in which afterward they jointly labored,
and to which, even in their student days, they looked
forward with passionate longing. New Spain was,
from the beginning, the goal of their most ardent
wishes. All their conversations turned on this theme.
Long years of delay and monastic routine did not
dampen the ardor of the four friends. Again and
again they petitioned to be sent as missionaries to the
New World, and again and again were disappointed.
At last, in 1749, there assembled in Cadiz a great
body of missionaries, destined chiefly for Mexico;

8 Glimpses of California

and Sena and Palou received permission to join the
band. Arriving at Cadiz, and finding two vacancies
still left in the party, they pleaded warmly that Crespl
and Verger be allowed to go also. At the very last
moment this permission was given, and the four
friends joyfully set sail in the same ship.

It is impossible at this distance of time to get any
complete realization of the halo of exalted sentiment
and rapture which then invested undertakings of this
kind. From the highest to the lowest, the oldest to
the youngest, it reached. Every art was lent to its
service, every channel of expression stamped with its
sign. Even on the rude atlases and charts of the day
were pictures of monks embarking in ships of dis-
covery ; the Virgin herself looking on from the sky,
with the motto above, " Matre Dei montravit via ; "
and on the ships' sails, " Unus non sufficit orbis."

In the memoir of Father Junipero, written by
his friend Palou, are many interesting details of the
voyage to Vera Cruz. It lasted ninety-nine days:
provisions fell short; starvation threatened; terrific
storms nearly wrecked the ship; but through all,
Father Junipero's courage never failed. He said,
"remembering the end for which they had come,"
he felt no fear. He performed mass each morning,
and with psalms and exhortations cheered the sinking
spirits of all on board.

For nineteen years after their arrival in Mexico,
Father Junipero and his three friends were kept at
work there, under the control of the College of San

Father yunipero and his Work 9

Fernando, in founding missions and preaching. On
the suppression of the Jesuit Order, in 1767, and its
consequent expulsion from all the Spanish dominions,
it was decided to send a band of Franciscans to Cali-
fornia, to take charge of the Jesuit missions there.
These were all in Lower California, no attempt at
settlement having been yet made in Upper California.
Once more the friends, glad and exultant, joined
a missionary band bound to new wildernesses. They
were but three now. Verger remaining behind in
the College of San Fernando. The band numbered
sixteen. Serra was put in charge of it, and was ap-
pointed president of all the California missions. His
biographer says he received this appointment " unable
to speak a single word for tears." It was not strange,
on the realization of a hope so long deferred. He
was now fifty-six years old; and from boyhood his
longing had been to labor among the Indians on the
western shores of the New World.

It was now the purpose of the Spanish Government
to proceed as soon as possible to the colonization of
Upper California. The passion of the Church allied
itself gladly with the purpose of the State; and the
State itself had among its statesmen and soldiers many
men who were hardly less fervid in religion than
were those sworn exclusively to the Church's service.
Such an one was Joseph de Galvez, who held the
office of Visitor-General and Commander, represent-
ing the person of the King, and inspecting the work-
ing of the Government in every province of the

lo Glimpses of California

Spanish Empire. Upon him rested the responsibility
of the practical organization of the fii'st expedition into
Upper California. It was he who ordered the carry-
ing of all sorts of seeds of vegetables, grains, and
flowers; everything that would grow in Old Spain
he ordered to be planted in New. He ordered that
two hundred head of cattle should be taken from
the northernmost of the Lower California missions,
and carried to the new posts. It was he also, as full
of interest for chapel as for farm, who selected and
packed with his own hands sacred ornaments and
vessels for church ceremonies. A curious letter of
his to Palou is extant, in which he says laughingly
that he is a better sacristan than Father Junipero,
having packed the holy vessels and ornaments
quicker and better than he. There are also extant
some of his original instructions to military and naval
commanders which show his religious ardor and wis-
dom. He declares that the first object of the expedi-
tion is " to establish the Catholic religion among a
numerous heathen people, submerged in the obscure
darkness of paganism, to extend the dominion of the
King our Lord, and to protect this peninsula from
the ambitious views of foreign nations."

With no clearer knowledge than could be derived
from scant records of Viscayno's voyage in 1602,
he selected the two best and most salient points of
the California coast, San Diego and Monterey, and
ordered the founding of a mission at each. He also
ordered the selection of a point midway between these

Father yunipero and his JVork 13

two, for another mission to be called Buena Ventura.
His activity, generosity, and enthusiasm were inex-
haustible. He seems to have had humor as well; for
when discussing the names of the missions to be
founded. Father Junipero said to him, " But is there
to be no mission for our Father Saint Francis?" he
replied, " If Saint Francis wants a mission, let him
show us his port, and we will put one there for
him!"

The records of this first expedition into California
are full of interest. It was divided into two parts,
one to go by sea, and one by land ; the sea party in
two ships, and the land party in two divisions. Every
possible precaution and provision was thought of by
the wise Galvez ; but neither precaution nor provision
could make the journey other than a terrible one.
Father Junipero, with his characteristic ardor, in-
sisted on accompanying one of the land parties,
although he was suffering severely from an inflamed
leg, the result of an injury he had received twenty
years before in journeying on foot from Vera Cruz
to the city of Mexico. Galvez tried in vain to detain
him; he said he would rather die on the road than
not go, but that he should not die, for the Lord
would carry him through. However, on the second
day out, his pain became so great that he could
neither sit, stand, nor sleep. Portald, the military
commander of the party, implored him to be carried
in a litter ; but this he could not brook. Calling one
of the muleteers to him, he said, —

14 Glimpses of California

" Son, do you not know some remedy for this aore
on my leg ? "

" Father," replied the muleteer, " what remedy can
I know ? I have only cured henata."

"Then consider me a beast," answered Serra;
" consider this sore on my leg a sore back, and give
me the same treatment you would apply to a beast."

Thus adjured, the muleteer took courage, and say-
ing, " I will do it, Father, to please you," he pro-
ceeded to mix herbs in hot tallow, with which he
anointed the wound, and so reduced the inflamma-
tion that Father Junipero slept all night, rose early,
said matins and mass, and resumed his journey in
comparative comfort. He bore this painful wound to
the end of his life ; and it was characteristic of the
man as well as of the ahiiormal standards of the age,
that he not only sought no measures for a radical
cure of the diseased member, but, obstinately accepts
ing the suffering as a cross, allowed the trouble to be
aggravated in every way, by going without shoes or
stockings and by taking long journeys on foot.

A diary kept by Father Crespf on his toilsome
march from VellicatA to San Diego is full of quaint
and curious entries, monotonous in its religious re-
iterations, but touching in its simplicity and un-
conscious testimony to his own single-heartedness
and patience. The nearest approach to a complaint
he makes is to say that " nothing abounds except
stones and thorns." When they journey for days
■with no water except scanty rations from the pre-

Father yunipero and his Work 15

cious casks they are carrying, he always piously trusts
water will be found on the morrow ; and when they
come to great tracts of impenetrable cactus thickets,
through which they are obliged to hew a pathway
with axes, as through a forest, and are drenched to
the skin in cold rains, and deserted by the Christian
Indians whom they had brought from Lower Cali-
fornia as guides, he mentions the facts without a
murmur, and has even for the deserters only a bene-
diction : " May God guard the misguided ones ! " A
far more serious grievance to him is, that toward the
end of the journey he could no longer celebrate full
mass because the wafers had given out. Sometimes the
party found themselves hemmed in by mountains, and
were forced to halt for days while scouts went ahead
to find a pass. More than once, hoping that at last
they had found a direct and easy route, they struck
down to the sea-shore, only to discover themselves
soon confronted by impassable spurs of the Coast
Range, and forced to toil back again up into the laby-
rinths of mesas and cactus plains. It was Holy Thurs-
day, the 24th of March, when they set out, and it was
not until the 13th of May that they reached the high
ground from which they had their first view of the
bay of San Diego, and saw the masts of the ships
lying at anchor there, — " which sight was a great
joy and consolation to us all," says the diary.

They named this halting-place " Espiritu Santo.'*
It must have been on, or very near, the ridge where
now runs the boundary line between the United

Glimpses of California

States and Mexico, as laid down by the treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is a grand promontory, ten
miles southeast of San Diego, thrusting out to sea ;
bare of trees, but matted thick with the dewy ice-plant,
and in early spring carpeted with flowers. An ugly
monument of stone stands there, bearing the names
of the American and Mexican commissioners who
established this boundary line in October, 1849. It
would seem much more fitting to have there a monu-
ment bearing the names of the heroic men — friars
and soldiers of Spain — who on that spot, on May 14,
1769, sang the first Easter hymn heard on Califor-
nia shores.

It was a sore grief for Father Crespf that the com-
mandant of the party would not wait here for him to
say a mass of thanksgiving; but with the port in
sight, impatience could not be restrained, and the
little band pushed on. As soon as the San Diego
camp was seen, the soldiers discharged a salute of
fire-arms, which was answered instantly from shore
and ship. Great joy filled every heart. The friars
who had come by sea ran to meet and embrace their
brothers. The gladness was dampened only by the
sad condition of the ships* crews, many of whom
were dead or dying. They had been four months,
with their poor charts and poorer ships, making their
way from La Paz up to San Diego ; and in conse-
quence of insufficient and unwholesome food, the
scurvy had broken out among them. It was a mel-
ancholy beginning for the new enterprise. When,

Father yunipero and his Work 17

six weeks later, the second land party with Father
Junipero arrived, eager to proceed to the establishing
of the mission, they found that their first duty was
to the sick and dying of their own people. In fifteen
days twenty-nine of the sailors and soldiers died.
The Indians, who at first had been gentle and friendly,
grew each day more insolent and thievish, even tear-
ing ojBE the clothes of the sick lying helpless in the
tents or tule huts on the beach. At last, on the 16th
of July, a cross was set up facing the port, and in a
rude booth of branches and reeds, mass was celebrated
and the grand hymn of " Veni Creator " was sung, the
pilgrims " supplying the want of an organ by discharg-
ing fire-arms," says the old record, and with only the
"smoke of muskets for incense." Thus was founded
the Mission of San Diego; and thus was laid the
corner-stone of the civilization of California on July
16, 1769.

Two days before this the indefatigable Crespf had
set ojBE with another overland party, Portald at its
head, to find Monterey. On this journey, also. Father
Crespf kept a diary, — little suspecting, probably,
with how much interest it would be studied a century
later. It was not strange that with only a compass
and seventeenth-century charts to guide them along
the zigzagging labyrinths of bays, headlands, and sand-
hills which make the California shore, they toiled to
no purpose seeking the Monterey harbor. It is piti-
ful to read the record of the days when they were

close upon it, setting up a cross on one of its hills,

^ i8 Glimpses of California ^

^^k aud yet could not see it; e

ven querying, 8o bewil-

^^B dered iiiid lost \wn-. tlicy, if

t: iiiigiit not have been

filled UD with

sauds since Vis-

cayno's time.

Forty leagues

\ ,

north of it they

L\„ L

went, and dis-
covered the

f '^*

present bay of

^B ^ ^^^ Francisco, 1
Bi '^^ which they at |

j^^Kck^'^^ "^TBF^

^BS^^t^-V'-Sj^

3--'*

oDce recognized

^^HBHbv^^B'

■J

by Viscayno'a

^^^B^'

description ; and
recalling the
speech of Gal-

^^^^^H<

^^^^H^^

veK in regard to

^^^^^^^^^'

Saint Francis

^^^^^^Uh'^'-l \

iwinting out a

^i^Hiffii

port if he wanted
own name, the

^^^^^^^^^^^HH

^^^H^^^^^^H

pious fathers "i

^^^^^^^^^^^^^1

thought it not [1

^^^^^^^^H

unlikely that the U

^^^^^^^^^^^^^1

Saint himself J

^^^^^^^^^^^^^1

had hidden A
Monterey from H

i^^H^^^^^I

Bftfl of lite San Gabrie

■

their sight, and H

Father yunipero and his IVork 19

led them to his own harbor. Month after month
passed, and still they were wandering. They were
footsore, weary, hungry, but not disheartened.
Friendly Indians everywhere greeted them kindly,
gave them nuts, and shell-fish, and bread made from
acorn flour. At one time seventeen of the party were
too ill to travel. Twice they halted and held council
on the question of abandoning the search. Some
were ready to continue as long as the provisions held
out, then to eat their mules, and go back on foot.
Fathers Crespl and Gomez volunteered to be left be-
hind alone.

At last, on the 11th of November, it was decided
to return by the route by which they had come. On
the 20th, finding that their flour had been stolen by
the soldiers, they divided the remainder into equal
parts, giving to each person enough to last him
two days. On Christmas Day they had a present of
nuts from friendly Indians, and on New Year's Day
they had the luck to kill a bear and three cubs, which
gave them a feast for which they offered most devout
thanksgivings. For the rest, they lived chiefly on
mussels, with now and then a wild goose. On the
24th of January they came out on the table-lands
above San Diego, six months and ten days from the
time of their departure. Firing a salute, they were
answered instantly by shots from the camp, and saw
an eager crowd running to meet them, great anxiety
having been felt at their long absence.

It is worth while, in studying the history of these

20 Glimpses of California

Franciscan missions, to dwell on the details of the
hardships endured in the beginning by their founders.
Only narrow-minded bigotry can fail to see in them
proofs of a spiritual enthusiasm and exaltation of self-
sacrifice which are rarely paralleled in the world's his-
tory. And to do justice to the results accomplished,
it is necessary to understand thoroughly the conditions
at the outset of the undertaking.

The weary, returned party found their comrades in
sorry plight. The scurvy had spread, and many more
had died. Father Junipero himself had been danger^
ously ill with it ; provisions were running low ; the
Indians were only half friendly, and were not to be
trusted out of sight. The supply-ships looked for
from Mexico had not arrived.

A situation more helpless, unprotected, discourag-
ing, could not be conceived than that of this little,
suffering band, separated by leagues of desert and
leagues of ocean from all possible succor. At last an
examination showed that there were only provisions
sufficient left to subsist the party long enough to make
the journey back to Vellicatd. It seemed madness to
remain longer ; and Governor Portald, spite of Father
Junipero's entreaties, gave orders to prepare for the
abandonment of the missions. He fixed the 20th of
March as the last day he would wait for the arrival of
the ship. This was Saint Joseph's Day. On the morn-
ing of it Father Junipero, who had been praying night
and day for weeks, celebrated to Saint Joseph a high I

mass^ with special supplications for relief. Before . \

Father yunipero and his JVork 21

noon a sail was seen on the horizon. One does not
need to believe in saints and saints' interpositions to
feel a thrill at this coincidence, and in fancying the ef-
fect the sudden vision of the relief -ship must have pro-
duced on the minds of devout men who had been
starving. The ship appeared for a few moments, then
disappeared ; doubtless there were some who scoffed
at it as a mere apparition. But Portald believed, and
waited ; and, four days later, in the ship came ! — the
" San Antonio," bringing bountiful stores of all that
was needed.

Courage and cheer now filled the very air. No time
was lost in organizing expeditions to go once more in
search of the mysteriously hidden Monterey. In less
than three weeks two parties had set off, — one by
sea in the " San Antonio." With this went Father
Junipero, still feeble from illness. Father Crespf,
imdaunted by his former six months of wandering,
joined the land party, reaching the Point of Pines,
on Monterey Harbor, seven days before the ship ar-
rived. As soon as she came in sight, bonfires were
lighted on the rocks, and the ship answered by firing
cannon. It was a great rejoicing. The next day,
June 1st, the officers of the two parties met, and ex-
changed congratulations ; and on the third they took
formal possession of the place : first, in the name of
the Church, by religious ceremonies ; secondly, in the
name of the King of Spain, unfurling the royal stand-
ard, and planting it in the ground, side by side with
the cross.

22 Glimpses of California

To one familiar with the beauty of the Monterey-
shore in June, the picture of this scene is vivid. The
sand-dunes were ablaze with color ; lupines in high,
waving masses, white and yellow; and great mats of
the glittering ice-plant, with myriads of rose-colored
umbels, lying flat on the white sand. Many rods in-
land, the air was sweet with their fragrance, borne by
the strong sea-wind. On long cliffs of broken, tem-
pest-piled rocks stood ranks upon ranks of grand old
cypress-trees, — gnarled, bent, twisted, defiant, full of
both pathos and triumph in their loneliness, in this
the only spot on earth to which they are native.

The booth of boughs in which the mass was per-
formed was built under a large oak, on the same spot
where Viscayno had landed and his Carmelite monks
had said mass one hundred and sixty-seven years be-
fore. The ceremonies closed with a ringing Te Deum,
— sailors, soldiers, monks, alike jubilant.

When the news of the founding of this second mis-
sion reached the city of Mexico, there was a furore
of excitement. The bells of the city were rung ; people
ran up and down the streets telling each other ; and
the viceroy held at his palace a grand reception, to
which went all persons of note, eager to congratulate
him and Galvez. Printed proclamations, giving full
accounts, were circulated, not only in Mexico but
throughout Spain. No province so remote, no home
so lowly, as to fail to hear the good news. It was
indeed good news to both State and Church. The
fact of the occupation of the new country was accom-

Father yunipero and his JVork 25

plished ; the scheme for the conversion and salvation
of the savage race was fairly inaugurated ; Monterey
and San Diego being assured, ultimate possession of
the whole of the coast line between would follow.
Little these gladdened people in Spain and Mexico
realized, however, the cost of the triumph over which
they rejoiced, or the true condition of the men who
had won it.

The history of the next fifteen years is a history of
struggle, hardship, and heroic achievement. The in-
defatigable Serra was the mainspring and support of
it all. There seemed no limit to liis endurance, no
bound to his desires ; nothing daunted his courage
or chilled his faith. When, in the sixth year after
the founding of the San Diego Mission, it was at-
tacked by hostile Indians, one of the fathers being
most cruelly murdered, and the buildings burned to
the ground, Father Junipero exclaimed, "Thank
God ! The seed of the Gospel is now watered by the
blood of a martyr ; that mission is henceforth estab-
lished ; " and in a few months he was on the spot,
with money and materials, ready for rebuilding;
pressing sailors, neophjrtes, soldiers, into the service ;
working with his own hands, also, spite of the fears
and protestations of all, and only desisting on posi-
tive orders from the military commander. He jour-
neyed, frequently on foot, back and forth through
the country, founding a new mission whenever, by
his urgent letters to the College of San Fernando
and to the Mexican vicerojrs, he had gathered to-

26 Glimpses of California

gether men and money enough to do so. In 1772,
when perplexities seemed inextricably thickened and
supplies had fallen so short that starvation threatened
the missions, he took ship to San Bias. With no
companion except one Indian boy, he toiled on foot
from San Bias to Guadalajara, two hundred and
forty miles. Here they both fell ill of fever, and
sank so low that they were supposed to be dying,
and the Holy Viaticum was administered to them.
But they recovered, and while only partly con-
valescent, pushed on again, reaching the city of
Mexico in February, 1773. Hard-hearted indeed
must the Mexican viceroy have been to refuse to
heed the prayers of an aged man who had given such
proofs as this of his earnestness and devotion. The
difficulties were cleared up, money and supplies
obtained, and Father Junipero returned to his post
with a joyful heart. Before leaving, he kissed the
feet of the friars in the college, and asked their
blessing, saying that they would never behold him
more.

Father Junipero's most insatiable passion was for
baptizing Indians ; the saving of one soul thus from
death filled him with unspeakable joy. His biog-
rapher illustrates this by the narrative of the first
infant baptism attempted at the San Diego Mission.
The Indians had been prevailed upon to bring an
infant to receive the consecration. Everything was
ready: Father Junipero had raised his hand to
sprinkle the child's face ; suddenly heathen terror

Father yunipero and his Work 27

got the better of the parents, and in the twinkling
of an eye they snatched their babe and ran. Tears
rolled down Father Junipero's cheeks : he declared
that only some un worthiness in himself could have
led to such a disaster ; and to the day of his death
he could never tell the story without tears, thinking
it must be owing to his sins that the soul of that
particular child had been lost.

When he preached he was carried out of himself
by the fervor of his desire to impress his hearers.
Baring his breast, he would beat it violently with a
stone, or bum the flesh with a lighted torch, to
enhance the effect of his descriptions of the tortures
of hell. There is in his memoir a curious engraving,
showing him lifted high above a motley group of
listener, holding in his hands the blazing torch and
the stone.

In the same book is an outline map of California
as he knew it. It is of the coast line from San Diego
to San Francisco, and the only objects marked on it
are the missions and dotted lines showing the roads
leading from one to another. All the rest is a
blank.

There were nine of these missions, founded by
Serra, before his death in 1784. They were founded
in the following order : San Diego, July 16, 1769 ;
San Carlos de Monterey, June 3, 1770 ; San Antonio
de Padua, July 14, 1771 ; San Gabriel, Sept. 8, 1771 ;
San Luis Obispo, Sept. 1, 1772; San Francisco
(Dolores), Oct. 9, 1776 ; San Juan Capistrano, Nov,

Glimpses of California

1, 1776; Santa Clara, Jan. 18, 1777; San Buena
Ventura, March 31, 1782.

The transports into which Father Juuipero was
thrown by the beginning of a new mission are graphi-
cally told by the companion who went with him to
establish the mission of San Antonio. With his
little train of soldiers, and mules laden with a few
weeks' supplies, he wandered off into the unexplored
wilderness slsty miles south of Monterey, looking
eagerly for river valleys promising feilility. As
soon as the beautiful oak-shaded plain, with its river
swift and full even in July, caught- his eye, he ordered
a halt, seized the bells, tied them to an oak bough,
and fell to ringing them with might and main, crying
aloud: "Hear, hear, O ye Gentiles I Come to the
Holy Church I Come to the faith of Jesus Christ ! "
Not a human creature was in sight, save his own
band ; and his companion remonstiated with him.
" Let me alone," cried Father Junipero. " Let me
unburden my heart, which could wish that this bell
should be heard by all the world, or at Iciist by all
the Gentiles in these mountains ; " and he rang on
till the echoes answered, and one astonished Indian
appeared, — tlie first instance in which a native had
been present at the foundation of a missi(m. Not
long afterward came a very aged Indian woman
named Agreda, begging to be baptized, saying that
she had seen a vision in the skies of a man clad like
the friars, and that her father had repeated to her in
her youth the same words they now spoke.

Father yunipero and his Work 31

The history of this San Antonio Mission justified
Father Junipero's selection. The site proved one of
the richest and most repaying, including, finally,
seven large farms with a chapel on each, and being
famous for the best wheat grown, and the best flour
made in the country. The curious mill in which the
flour was ground is still to be seen, — a most interest-
ing ruin. It was run by water brought in a stone-
walled ditch for many miles, and driven through a
funnel-shaped flume so as to strike the side of a large
water-wheel, revolving horizontally on a shaft. The
building of this aqueduct and the placing of the wheel
were the work of an Indian named Nolberto, who
took the idea from the balance-wheel of a watch, and
did all the work with his own hands. The walls are
broken now ; and the sands have so blown in and
piled around the entrance, that the old wheel seems
buried in a cellar ; linnets have builded nests in the
dusky corners, and are so seldom disturbed that their
bright eyes gaze with placid unconcern at curious
intruders.

Many interesting incidents are recorded in connec-
tion with the establishment of these first missions.
At San Gabriel the Indians gathered in great force,
and were about to attack the little band of ten soldiers
and two friars preparing to plant their cross ; but on
the unfurling of a banner with a life-size picture of
the Virgin painted on it, they flung away their bows
and arrows, came running toward the banner with
gestures of reverence and delight, and threw their

beads and other ornaments on the ground before it,
as at the feet of a suddenly recognized queen.

The San Gabriel Indiana seem to have been a
superior race. They epoke a soft, musical langn^e,
now nearly lost. Their name for God signified " Giver

Ulil Mill built bi/ Indians al .San Aulonio

of Life." They had no belief in a devil or in hell,
and persisted always in regarding them as concerning
only white men. Robbery was unknown among
them, murder was punished by deatli, and marriage
between those near of kin was not allowed. They
bad names for the points of the compass, and knew

Father yunipero and his JVork 33

the North Star, calling it Runi. They had games
at which they decked themselves with flower gar-
lands, which wreathed their heads and hung down
to their feet. They had certain usages of politeness,
such as that a child, bringing water to an elder,
must not taste it on the way; and that to pass
between two who were speaking was an offence.
They had song contests, often lasting many days,
and sometimes handed down to the next generation.
To a people of such customs as these, the sym-
bols, shows, and ceremonies of the Catholic Church
must needs have seemed especially beautiful and
winning.

The records of the founding of these missions are
similar in details, but are full of interest to one in
sympathy either with their spiritual or their historical
significance. The routine was the same in all cases.
A cross was set up ; a booth of branches was built ;
the ground and the booth were consecrated by holy
water, and christened by the name of a saint ; a mass
was performed; the neighboring Indians, if there
were any, were roused and summoned by the ringing
of bells swung on limbs of trees; presents of cloth
and trinkets were given them to inspire them with
trust, and thus a mission was founded. Two monks
(never, at first, more) were appointed to take charge
of this cross and booth, and to win, baptize, convert,
and teach all the Indians to be reached in the region.
They had for guard and help a few soldiers, and
sometimes a few already partly civilized and Chris-

- Glimpses of California

tianked Indians ; several head of cattle, some tools
and seeds, and holy vessels for the church service,
completed their store of weapons, spiiitual and secu-
lar, offensive and defensive, with wliicli to conquer
the wilderness and its savages. There needs no work
of the imagination to help this picture. Taken in its
sternest realism, it ia vivid and tlirilling ; contrasting
the wretched poverty of these single-handed begin-
nings with the final splendor and riches attained, the
result seems wellnigh miraculous.

From the rough hooth of boughs and reeds of 177tf
to the pilliire, arched conidora, and domes of the
stately stone churchea of a lialf-century later, is a
change only a degree less wonderful than the change
in the IncJian, from the naked savage with his one
stone tool, grinding acoi'u-meal in a rock bowl, to the
industrious tiller of soil, weaver of cloth, worker in
metals, and singer of sacred hymns. The steps of
this change were slow at firat. In 1772, at the end
of five years' work, five missions had been founded,
and four hundred and ninety-one Indians baptized.
There were then, in these five missions, but nineteen
friars and sixty soldiers. In 1786, La Perause, a
French naval commander, who voyaged along the
California coast, leaves it on record that there were
but two hundred and eighty-two soldiers, and about
one hundred officers and friars, all told, in both Upper
and Lower California, from Cape St, Lucas to San
Francisco, a line of eight hundred leagues. At this
time there were five thousand one hundred and forty-

Father yunipero and his IVork 35

three Indians, in the missions of Upper California
alone. In the year 1800 there were, at the mission of
San Diego, fifteen hundred and twenty-one Indians ;
and the San Diego garrison, three miles away from
the mission, numbered only one hundred and sixty-
seven souls, — oflBcers, soldiers, servants, women, and
children. Such figures as these seem sufficient refu-
tation of the idea sometimes advanced, that the Indians
were converted by force and held in subjection by
terror. There is still preserved, in the archives of
the Franciscan College at Santa Barbara, a letter
written by Father Junipero to the Viceroy of Mexico,
in 1776, imploring him to send a force of eighty
soldiers to be divided among seven missions. He
patiently explains that the friars, stationed by twos,
at new missions, from sixty to a hundred miles dis-
tant from each other, cannot be expected to feel safe
without a reasonable miUtary protection ; and he asks
pertinently what defence could be made, " in case the
enemy should tempt the Gentiles to attack us." That
there was so little active hostility on the part of the
savage tribes, that they looked so kindly as they did
to the ways and restraints of the new life, is the
strongest possible proof that the methods of the friars
in dealing with them must have been both wise and
humane.

During the first six years there was but one serious
outbreak, — that at San Diego. No retaliation was
shown toward the Indians for this; on the contrary,
the orders of both friars and militarjr commanders

36 Glimpses of California

were that they should be treated with even greater
kindness than before ; and in less than two years the
mission buildings were rebuilt, under a guard of only
a half-score of soldiers with hundreds of Indians
looking on, and many helping cheerfully in the work.
The San Carlos Mission at Monterey was Father
Junipero's own charge. There he spent all his time,
when not called away by his duties as president of
the missions. There he died, and there he was buried.
There, also, his beloved friend and brother,' Father
Crespf, labored by his side for thirteen years. Crespf
was a sanguine, joyous man, sometimes called El
Beato, from his happy temperament. No doubt his
gayety made Serra's sunshine in many a dark day ;
and grief at his death did much to break down the
splendid old man's courage and strength. Only a few
months before it occurred, they had gone together for
a short visit to their comrade. Father Palou, at the
San Francisco Mission. When they took leave of
him, Crespi said, " Farewell forever ; you will see me
no more." This was late in the autumn of 1781, and
on New Year's Day, 1782, he died, aged sixty years,
and having spent half of those years in laboring for
the Indians. Serra lived only two years longer, and
is said never to have been afterwards the same as be-
fore. For many years he had been a great sufferer
from an affection of the heart, — aggravated, if not
induced, by his fierce beatings of his breast with a
stone while he was preaching. But physical pain
seemed to make no impression on his mind. If it did

Father yunipero and his IVork 37

not incapacitate him for action, he held it of no ac-
count. Only the year before his death, being then
seventy years old, and very lame, he had journeyed
on foot from San Diego to Monterey, visiting every
mission and turning aside into all the Indian settle-
ments on the way. At this time there were on the
Santa Barbara coast alone, within a space of eighty
miles, twenty-one villages of Indians, roughly esti-
mated as containing between twenty and thirty
thousand souls. He is said to have gone weeping
from village to village because he could do nothing
for them.

He reached San Carlos in January, 1784, and never
again went away. The story of his last hours and
death is in the old church records of Monterey, writ-
ten there by the hand of the sorrowing Palou, the
second day after he had closed his friend's eyes. It
is a quaint and touching narrative.

Up to the day before his death, his indomitable
will upholding the failing strength of his dying body.
Father Junipero had read in the church the canoni-
cal offices of each day, a service requiring an hour
and a half of time. The evening before his death he
walked alone to the church to receive the last sacra-
ment. The church was crowded to overflowing with
Indians and whites, many crying aloud in uncontroll-
able grief.

Father Junipero knelt before the altar with great
fervor of manner, while Father Palou, with tears roll-
ing down his cheeks, read the services for the dying,

38 Glimpses of California

gave him absolution, and administered the Holy

Viaticum. Then rose from tjhoked and tremulous

voices the strains of the grand hymn "Tantum

Ergo," —

** Tantum ergo Sacramentum

Veneremur cernui,

' Et antiquum documentum

Novo cedat ritui ;

Praestet fides' supplementum

Sensuum defectui.

" Genitori genitoque
Laus et jubilatio,
Salus, honor, virtus quoque

Sit et benedictio *,
Procedenti ab utroque
Compar sit laudatio."

A startled thrill ran through the church as Father
Junipero's own voice, "high and strong as ever,"
says the record, joined in the hymn. One by one
the voices of his people broke down, stifled by sobs,
until at last the dying man's voice, almost alone,
finished the hymn. After this he gave thanks, and
returning to his cell-like room spent the whole of the
night in listening to penitential psalms and litanies,
and giving thanks to God; all the time kneeling or
sitting on the ground supported by the loving and
faithful Palou. In the morning, early, he asked for
the plenary indulgence, for which he again knelt,
and confessed again. At noon the chaplain and the
captain of the bark " St. Joseph," then lying in port
at Monterey, came to visit him. He welcomed them,
and cordially embracing the chaplain, said, "You

Father yunipero and his IVork 41

have come just in time to cast the earth upon my
body." After they took their leave, he asked Palou
to read to him again the Recommendations of the
Soul. At its conclusion he responded earnestly, in
as clear voice as in health, adding, '* Thank God, I
am now without fear." Then with a firm step he
walked to the kitchen, saying that he would like a
cup of broth. As soon as he had taken the broth, he
exclaimed, " I feel better now ; I will rest ; " and
lying down he closed his eyes, and without another
word or sign of struggle or pain ceased to breathe,
entering indeed into a rest of which his last word had
been solemnly prophetic.

Ever since morning the grief-stricken people had
been waiting and listening for the tolling death-bell
to announce that all was over. At its first note they
came in crowds, breathless, weeping, and lamenting.
It was with great difiiculty that the soldiers could
keep them from tearing Father Junipero's habit piece-
meal from his body, so ardent was their desire to possess
some relic of him. The corpse was laid at once in a
coffin which he himself had ordered made many
weeks before. The vessels in port fired a salute of
one hundred and one guns, answered by the same
from the guns of the presidio at Monterey, — an
honor given to no one below the rank of general.
But the hundred gun salutes were a paltry honor in
comparison with the tears of the Indian congregation.
Soldiers kept watch around his coffin night and day
till the burial; but they could not hold back the

Glimpses of California

throngs of tlie poor creatures who pressed to touch
the hand of the father they had so much loved, and
to hear away Bomething, if only a thread, of the
garments he had worn.

His ardent and impassioned nature and his untir-
ing labors had won their deepest affection and con-
fidence. It was his habit when at San Carlos to
spend all his time with them, working by their side
in the fields, making adobe, digging, tilting, doing,
in short, all that he required of tliem. Day after
day he thus labored, only desisting at the boura for
performing offices in the church. Whenever an
Indian came to address him, he made the sign of the
cross on his forehcivfl, and spoke to him some words
of spiritual injunction or benediction. The arbitiari-
ness — or, as some of his enemies called it, haughty
self-will — which brought Serra at times into conflict
with the military authorities when their purposes or
views clashed with his own, never came to the sur-
face in his spiritual functions, or in his relation with
the Indian converts. He loved them, and yearned
over them as bi-ands to be snatched from the burning.
He had baptized over oue thousand of them with his
own bands ; his whole life he spent for them, and
was ready at any moment to lay it down if that would
have benefited them more. Absolute single-hearted-
ness like this is never misunderstood by, and never
antagonizes equally single-hearted people, either high
or low. But to be absolutely single-hearted in a
moral purpose is almost inevitably to be doggedly

Father yunipero and his JVork 43

one-ideaed in regard to practical methods ; and the
single-hearted, one-ideaed man, with a great moral
purpose, is sure to be often at swords' points with
average men of selfish interests and mixed notions.
This is the explanation of the fact that the later
years of Serra's life were marred by occasional col-
lisions with the military authorities in the country.
No doubt the impetuosity of his nature made him
sometimes hot in resentment and indiscreet of speech.
But in spite of these failings, he yet remains the
foremost, grandest figure in the missions' history.
If his successors in their administration had been
equal to him in spirituality, enthusiasm, and in-
tellect, the mission establishments would never have
been so utterly overthrown and ruined.

Father Junipero sleeps on the spot where he
labored and died. His grave is under the ruins of
the beautiful stone church of his mission, — the
church which he saw only in ardent and longing
fancy. It was perhaps the most beautiful, though
not the grandest of the mission churches; and its
ruins have to-day a charm far exceeding all the
others. The fine yellow tint of the stone, the grand
and unique contour of the arches, the beautiful star-
shaped window in the front, the simple yet eflfective
lines of carving on pilaster and pillar and doorway,
the symmetrical Moorish tower and dome, the worn
steps leading up to the belfry, — all make a picture
whose beauty, apart from hallowing associations, is
enough to hold one spell-bound. Reverent Nature

Glimpses of California

haa rebuilt with grass and bloasoins even the crum-
bling window-sills, across which the wiud blows free
from the blue oeeitn just beyond ; and on the day we
saw the place, golden wheat, fresh reaped, was piled
in loose mounds on the south slope below the
cbureh's southern wall. It reminded me of the
tales I had lieard from many aged luen and women
of a beautiful custom the Indians had of scattering
their choicest grains on the ground at the friars' feet,
as a token of homage.

The roof of ttie church long ago fell in; its doors
have stood open for years; and the fierce sea^-gales
have been sweeping in, piling sands until a great part
of the floor is covered with solid earth on which every
summer grasses and weeds grow high enough to be
cut by sickles. Of the thousands of acres which the
Mission Indians once cultivated in the San Carlos
valley, only nine were finally decreed hy the United
States Government to belong to the church. These
were so carelessly surveyed that no avenue of
approach was left open to the mission buildings, and
a part of the land had to be sold to buy a right of
way to the church. The remnant left makes a little
farm, by the rental of which a man can be hired to
hike charge of the whole place, and keep it, if possi-
ble, from further desecration and rain. The present
keeper is a devout Portuguese, whose broken English
becomes eloquent as he speaks of the old friars whose
graves he guards.

" Dera work for civilize," he said, " not work for
money. Dey work to religion."

Father yunipero and his JVork 47

In clearing away the earth at the altar end of the
church, in the winter of 1882, this man came upon
stone slabs evidently covering graves. On opening
one of these graves, it was found to hold three coffins.
From the minute description, in the old records, of
Father Junipero's place of burial. Father Casanova,
the priest now in charge of the Monterey parish, be-
came convinced that one of these coffins must be his.
On the opposite side of the church is another grave,
where are buried two of the earliest governors of
California.

It is a disgrace to both the Catholic Church and
the State of California that this grand old ruin, with
its sacred sepulchres, should be left to crumble away.
If nothing is done to protect and save it, one short
hundred years more will see it a shapeless, wind-swept
mound of sand. It is not in our power to confer
honor or bring dishonor on the illustrious dead. We
ourselves, alone, are dishonored when we fail in
reverence to them. The grave of Junipero Serra
may be buried centuries deep, and its very place for-
gotten ; yet his name will not perish, nor his fame
suJBfer. But for the men of the country whose civili-
zation he founded, and of the Church whose faith he
so glorified, to permit his burial-place to sink into
oblivion, is a shame indeed I

If the little grief-stricken band of monks who
stood weeping around Junipero Serra's grave in 1784
could have foreseen the events of the next thirty-
years, their weeping would have been turned into
exultant joy; but not the most daring enthusiast
among them could have dreamed of the harvest of
power destined to be raised from the seed thus sown
in weakness.

Almost with his dying breath Father Junipero had
promised to use "all his influence with God" in
behalf of the missions. In the course of the next
four months after his death more converts were bap-
tized than in the whole three years previous ; and it
became at once the common belief that his soul had
passed directly into heaven, and that this great wave
of conversions was the result of his prayers. Pros-
perity continued steadily to increase. Mission after
mission was successfully founded, until, in 1804, the
occupation of the sea-coast line from San Francisco
to San Diego was complete, there being nineteen
mission establishments only an easy day's journey
apart from each other.

Father yunipero and his Work 51

The ten new missions were founded in the follow-
ing order : Santa Barbara, Dec. 4, 1786 ; La Purissima,
Dec. 8, 1787 ; Santa Cruz, Sept. 25, 1791 ; Soledad,
Oct. 9, 1791; San Jos^, June 11, 1797; San Juan
Bautista, June 24, 1797 ; San Miguel, July 25, 1797 ;
San Fernando Rey, Sept. 8, 1797 ; San Luis Rey de
Francia, June 18, 1798 ; Santa Inez, Sept. 7, 1804.

Beginnings had also been made on a projected
second line, to be from thirty to fifty miles back from
the sea; and this inland chain of settlements and
development promised to be in no way inferior to the
first. The wealth of the mission establishments had
grown to an almost incredible degree. In several of
them massive stone churches had been built, of an
architecture at once so simple and harmonious that,
even in ruins, it is to-day the grandest in America ;
and it will remain, so long as arch, pillar, or dome
of it shall stand, a noble and touching monument
of the patient Indian workers who built, and of the
devoted friars who designed, its majestic and grace-
ful proportions.

In all of the missions were buildings on a large
scale, providing for hundreds of occupants, for all
the necessary trades and manufactures, and many of
the ornamental arts of civilized life. Enormous tracts
of land were under high cultivation ; the grains and
cool fruits of the temperate zone flourishing, in the
marvellous California air, side by side with the palm,
olive, grape, fig, orange, and pomegranate. From the
two hundred head of cattle sent by the wise Galvez,

52 Glimpses of California

had grown herds past numbering ; and to these had
been added vast flocks of sheep and herds of horses.
In these nineteen missions were gathered over twenty
thousand Indians, leading reguhvr and industrious
lives, and conforming to the usages of the Catholic
religion.

A description of the San Luis Rey Mission, written
by De Mofi-as, an attach4 of the Frencii Legation in
Mexico in 1842, gives a clear idea of the form, and
some of the methods, of the mission establishments : —

'' The building is a quadrilateral, four hundred and fifty
feet aquai-e ; the church occupies one of its wings ; the
faijade is oroameuted with a, gallery. The building is
two stories in height. The interior is formed by a court
ornamented with fountains, and decorated with trees.
Upon the gallery which runs around it open the dormi-
tories of the monks, of the majors-domo, aud of travellei'S,
small workshops, schoolrooms, and storerooms. The
hospitals are situated in the most quiet parts of the mis-
sion, where also the schools are kept. The young Indian
girls dwell in halls called monasteries, and are called
nuns. Placed under the care of Indian matrons, who
are worthy of confidence, they learn to make cloth of
wool, cotton, aud fias, and do not leave the monastery
until they are old CTioiigh to be married. The Indian
chUdren mingle in schools with those of the white col-
onists. A certain number chosen among the pupils who
display the most intelligence learn music, chanting, the
violin, flute, horn, violoncello, or other instruments.
Those who distinguish themselves in the carpenters'
shops, at the forge, or in agricultural labors are appointed
alcaldes, or overseers, and charged with the directions of
the laborers."

Father Junipero and his IVork 53

Surrounding these buiklings, or arranged in regular
streets upon one side of them, were the homes of the
Indian famnics. Tho?,- u-ie Inillt of adobe, or of

A Capaclem Fireplace — San Luis Bey

reeds, aftei- the native fashion. The daily routine of
the Indians' life was simple and uniform. They were
divided into squads of laborers. At sunrise the An-
gelus bell ealled them to mass. After the mass they
breakfasted, and then dispersed to their various

54 Glimpses of California

labors. At eleven they were again summoned to-
gether for dinner, after which they rested until two,
when they went again to work, and worked until the
evening Angelus, just before sunset. After prayers
and supper they were in the habit of dancing and play-
ing games until bedtime. Theii* food was good. They
had meat at noon, accompanied hy posale^ a sort of suc-
cotash made of corn, beans, and wheat, boiled to-
gether. Their breakfast and supper were usually of
porridge made from different grains, called atole and
pinole.

The men wore linen shirts, pantaloons, and blankets.
The overseers and best workmen had suits of cloth like
the Spaniards. The women received every year two
chemises, one gown, and a blanket. De Mofras
says : —

"When the hides, tallow, grain, wine, and oil were
sold at good prices to ships from abroad, the monks dis-
tributed handkerchiefs, wearing apparel, tobacco, and
trinkets among the Indians, and devoted the surplus to
the embellishment of the churches, the purchase of mu-
sical instruments, pictures, church ornaments, etc. ; still
they were careful to keep a part of the harvest in the
granaries to provide for years of scarcity."

The rule of the friars was in the main a kindly one.
The vice of drunkenness was severely punished by
flogging. Quarrelling between husbands and wives
was also dealt with summarily, the offending^ parties
being chained together by the leg till they were glad

Father yunipero and his IVork 55

to promise to keep peace. New converts and recruits
were secured in many ways : sometimes by sending
out parties of those already attached to the new mode
of life, and letting them set forth to the savages the ad-
vantages and comforts of the Christian way ; some-
times by luring strangers in with gifts ; sometimes, it
is said, by capturing them by main force ; but of this
there is only scanty evidence, and it is not probable
that it was often practised. It has also been said that
cruel and severe methods were used to compel the In-
dians to work ; that they were driven imder the lash by
their overseers, and goaded with lances by the soldiers.
No doubt there were individual instances of cruelty ;
seeds of it being indigenous in human nature, such
absolute control of hundreds of human beings could
not exist without some abuses of the power. But
that the Indians were, on the whole, well treated and
cared for, the fact that so many thousands of them
chose to remain in the missions is proof. With open
wilderness on all sides, and with thousands of savage
friends and relatives close at hand, nothing but their
own free will could have kept such numbers of them
loyal and contented. Forbes, in his history of Cali-
fornia, written in 1832, says : —

"The best and most unequivocal proof of the good
conduct of the fathers is to be found in the unbounded
affection and devotion invariably shown toward them by
their Indian subjects. They venerate them not merely
as friends and fathers, but with a degree of devotion
approaching to adoration.*'

56 Glimpses of California

The picture of life in one of these missions during
their period of prosperity is unique and attractive.
The whole place was a hive of industry: trades
plying indoors and outdoors ; tillers, herders, vin-
tagers by hundreds, going to and fro; children in
schools; women spinning; bands of young men
practising on musical instruments ; music, the scores
of which, in many instances, they had themselves
written out ; at evening, all sorts of games of run-
ning, leaping, dancing, and ball-throwing, and the
picturesque ceremonies of a religion which has always
been wise in availing itself of beautiful agencies in
color, form, and harmony.

At every mission were walled gardens with waving
palms, sparkling fountains, groves of olive trees,
broad vineyards, and orchards of all manner of fruits ;
over all, the sunny, delicious, winterless California
sky.

More than mortal, indeed, must the Franciscans
have been, to have been able, under these conditions,
to preserve intact the fervor and spirit of self-
abnegation and deprivation inculcated by the rules
of their order. There is a half-comic pathos in the
records of occasional efforts made by one and another
of the presidents to check the growing disposition
toward ease on the part of the friars. At one time
several of them were found to be carrying silver
watches. The watches were taken away, and sent
to Guadalajara to be sold, the money to be paid into
the Church treasury. At another time an order was

Father yunipero and his JVork 57

issued, forbidding the wearing of shoes and stockings
in place of sandals, and the occupying of too large
and comfortable rooms. And one zealous president,
finding that the friars occasionally rode in the carts
belonging to their missions, had all the carts burned,
to compel the fathers to go about on foot.

The friars were forced, by the very facts of their
situation, into the exercise of a constant and abound-
ing hospitality ; and this of itself inevitably brought
about large departures from the ascetic regime of
living originally preached and practised. Most
royally did they discharge the obligations of this
hospitality. Travellers' rooms were kept always
ready in every mission; and there were even set
apart fruit orchards called " travellers' orchards." A
man might ride from San Diego to Monterey by easy
day's journeys, spending each night as guest in a
mission establishment. As soon as he rode up, an
Indian page would appear to take his horse ; another
to show him to one of the travellers' rooms. He was
served with the best of food and wine as long as he
liked to stay, and when he left he might, if he wished,
take from the mission herd a fresh horse to carry him
on his journey. All the California voyagers and
travellers of the time speak in glowing terms of this
generous and cordial entertaining by the friars. It
was, undoubtedly, part of their policy as representa-
tives of the State, but it was no less a part of their
duty as Franciscans.

Some of the highest tributes which have been paid

Glimpses of California

to them, both as men and as administrators of affairs,
have come from strangers who, thus sojourning under
their roofs, had the best opportunity of knowing their
lives. Says Forbes : —

" Their conduct has been marked by a degree of be-
nevolence, humanity, and moderation probably unex-
ampled in any other situation. ... I have never heard
that thoy have not acted with the most perfect fidelity,
or that they ever betrayed a trust, or acted with
inhumanity."

This testimony is of the more weight that it comes
from a man not in sympathy with either the religious
or the secular system on which the friars' labors were
based.

The tales still told by old people of festal occasions
at the missions sound like tales of the Old World
rather than of the New. There was a strange differ-
ence, fiftj' yeara ago, between the atmosphere of life
on the east and west sides of the American continent :
on the Atlantic shore, the descendants of the Puritans,
weighed down by serious purpose, half grudging the
time for their one staid yearly Thanksgiving, and
driving the Indians farther and farther into the
wilderness every year, fighting and killing them ;
on the sunny Pacific shore, the meriy people of
Mexican and Spanish blood, troubling themselves
about nothing, dancing away whole days and nights
like children, while their priests were gathering the
Indians by thousands into communities, and feeding
and teaching them.

Father yunipero and his Work 59

The most beautiful woman known in California a
half-century ago still lives in Santa Barbara, white-
haired, bright-eyed, eloquent-tongued to-day. At
the time of - her marriage, her husband being a
brother of the Superior of the Santa Barbara mission,
her wedding banquet was spread on tables running
the whole length of the outer corridor of the mission.
For three days and three nights the feasting and
dancing were kept up, and the whole town was bid.
On the day after her wedding came the christening
or blessing of the right tower of the church. She
and her husband, having been chosen godfather and
godmother to the tower, walked in solemn procession
around it, carrying lighted candles in their hands,
preceded by the friar, who sprinkled it with holy
water and bunied incense. In the four long streets
of Indians' houses, then running eastward from the
mission, booths of green boughs, decorated with
flowers, were set up in front of all the doors.
Companies of Indians from other missions came as
guests, dancing and singing as they approached.
Their Indian hosts went out to meet them, also
singing, and pouring out seeds on the ground for
them to walk on. These were descendants of the
Indians who, when Viscayno anchored off Santa
Barbara in 1602, came out in canoes, bringing their
king, and rowed three times around Viscayno's ship,
chanting a chorus of welcome. Then the king, going
on board the ship, walked three times around the
deck, chanting the same song. He then gave to the

6o Glimpses of California

Spaniards gifts of all the simple foods he had, and
implored them to land, promising that if they would
come and be their brothers, he would give to each
man ten wives.

With the increase of success, wealth, and power
on the part of the missions came increasing com-
plexities in their relation to the military settlements
in the country. The original Spanish plan of coloni-
zation was threefold, — religious, military, and civil.
Its first two steps were a mission and a presidio, or
garrison, — the presidio to be the guard of the mission ;
later was to come the pueblo,^ or town. From in-
definiteness in the understanding of property rights,
and rights of authority, as vested under these three
heads, there very soon arose confusion, which led to
collisions, — collisions which have not yet ceased,
and never will, so long as there remains a land-title
in California to be quarrelled over. The law records
of the State are brimful of briefs, counter-briefs,
opinions, and counter-opinions regarding property
issues, all turning on definitions which nobody has
now clear right to make, of old pueblo and presidio
titles and bounds.

In the beginning there were no grants of land;

1 " The term * pueblo ' answers to that of the English word * town,'
in all its vagueness and all its precision. As the word * town ' in
English generally embraces every kind of population from the village
to the city, and also, used specifically, signifies a town corporate and
politic, so the word * pueblo ' in Spanish ranges from the hamlet to the
city, but, used emphatically, signifies a town corporate and politic." —
Dwinelle's Colonial History of San Francisco.

Father yunipero and his JVork 63

everytliing was done by royal decree. In the form
of taking possession of the new lands, the Church,
by right of sacred honor, came first, the religious
ceremony always preceding the military. Not till
the cross was set up, and the ground consecrated and
taken possession of, in the name of God, for the
Church's purposes, did any military commander ever
think of planting the royal standard, symbolizing the
king's possession. In the early days the relations
between the military and the ecclesiastical represen-
tatives of the king were comparatively simple : the
soldiers were sent avowedly and specifically to pro-
tect the friars ; moreover, in those earlier days,
soldiers and friars were alike devout, and, no doubt,
had the mission interests more equally at heart than
they did later. But each year's increase of numbers
in the garrisons, and of numbers and power in the
missions, increased the possibilities of clashing, until
finally the relations between the two underwent a
singular reversal; and the f rial's, if disposed to be
satirical, might well have said that, however bad a
rule might be which would not work both ways,
a rule which did was not of necessity a good one, it
being now the duty of the missions to support the
presidios ; the military governors being authorized to
draw upon the friars not only for supplies, but for
contributions of money and for levies of laborers.^

^ In the decade between 1801 and 1810 the missions famished to
the presidios about eighteen thousand dollars' worth of supplies each
jemr.

Glimpses of California

On the other hand, no lands could be set off or
assigned for colonists without consent of the friars,
and there were many other curious and entangling
cross-purpose powera distributed between friara and
military governora quite sufficient to make it next to
impossible for things to go smoothly.

The mission affairs, so far as their own internal
interests were concerned, were administered with
admirable simplicity and system. The friars in charge
of the missions were responsible dii-ectly to the presi-
dent, or prefect, of the missions. He, in turn, was
responsible to the president, or guaidian, of the Fran-
ciscan College of San Fernando, in Mexico. One
responsible officer, called procurador, was kept in the
city of Mexico to buy supplies for the missions from
stipends due, and frani the dinfts given to the friaiB
by the presidio commanded for goods furnished to
the presidios. There was also a syndic, or general
agent, at San Bias, who attended to the shipping and
forwarding of supplies. It was a happy combination
of the minimum of functionaries with the maximum
of responsibility.

The income supporting the missions was derived
from two sources, the first of wliich was a fund, called
the " Pious Fund," originally belonging to the Jesuit
oi'der, but on the suppression of that order, in 1768,
taken possession of by the Spanish Government in
trust for the Church. This fund, begun early in the
eighteenth century, was made up of estates, mines,
manufactories, and flocks, — all gifts of rich Catholics

Father yunipero and his JVork 65

to the Society of Jesus. It yielded an income of
fifty thousand dollars a year, the whole of which be-
longed to the Church, and was to be used in paying
stipends to the friars (to the Dominicans in Lower as
well as to the Franciscans in Upper California), and
in the purchasing of articles needed in the missions.
The missions' second source of income was from the
sales of their own products : first to the presidios, —
these sales paid for by drafts on the Spanish or Mexi-
can Government; second, to trading ships, coming
more and more each year to the California coast.

As soon as revolutionary troubles began to agitate
Spain and Mexico, the income of the missions from
abroad began to fall off. The Pious Fund was too
big a sum to be honestly administered by any govern-
ment hard pressed for money. Spain began to filch
from it early, to pay the bills of her wars with Portu-
gal and England; and Mexico, as soon as she had
the chance, followed Spain's example vigorously, sell-
ing whole estates and pocketing their price, farming
the fund out for the benefit of the State treasury,
and, finally, in Santa Anna's time, selling the whole
outright to two banking-houses. During these troub-
lous times the friars not only failed frequently
to receive their regular stipends allotted from the in-
terest of this Pious Fund, but their agent was unable
to collect the money due them for the supplies fur-
nished to the presidios. The sums of which they
were thus robbed by two governments — that, being

ostensibly of the Catholic faith, should surely have

Glimpses of California

held the Church's property sacred — mounted up in
a few years to such enormous figures that restitution
would have been practically impossible, and, except
for their own internal sources of revenue, the mis-
sions must have come to bankruptcy and ruin.

However, the elements which were to bring about
this ruin were already at work, — were, indeed, in-
herent in the very system on which they had been
founded. The Spanish Government was impatient
to see carried out, and to reap the benefit of, the
pueblo feature of its colonization pkn. With a sin-
gular lack of realization of the time needed to make
citizens out of savages, it had set ten years as the
period at the expiration of which the Indian com-
munities attached to the missions were to be formed
into pueblos, — the missions to be seculaiized, that is,
turned into curacies, the pueblo being the parish.
This was, no doubt, the wise and proper ultimate
scheme, — the only one, in fact, which provided
either for the entire civilization of the Indian or the
auce ess fill colonization of the country. But five
times ten years would have been little enough to
allow for getting such a scheme fairly under way,
and another five times ten years for the finishing and
rounding of the work. It ia strange how sure civil-
ized peoples are, when planning and legislating for
savages, to forget that it has always taken centuries
to graft on or evolve out of savagery anything like
civilization.

Aiming towards this completing of their coloniza-

Father yunipero and his IVork 69

tion plan, the Spanish Government had very early
founded the pueblos of Los Angeles and San Jos^.
A second class of pueblos, called, in the legal phrase
of California's later days, " Presidial Pueblos," had
originated in the settlement of the presidios, and
gradually grown up around them. There were four
of these, — San Diego, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and
San Francisco.

It is easy to see how, as these settlements increased,
of persons more or less unconnected with the missions,
there must have grown up discontent at the Church's
occupation and control of so large a proportion of
the country. Ready for alliance with this discontent
was the constant jealousy on the part of the military
authorities, whose measures were often — and, no
doubt, often rightly — opposed by the friars. These
fomenting causes of disquiet reacted on the impa-
tience and greed in Spain ; all together slowly, steadily
working against the missions, until, in 1813, the
Spanish Cortes passed an act decreeing their seculari-
zation. This was set forth in sounding phrase as an
act purely for the benefit of the Indians, that they
might become citizens of towns. But it was, to say
the least of it, as much for Spain as for the Indians,
since, by its provisions, one half of the mission lands
were to be sold for the payment of Spain's national
debt. This act, so manifestly premature, remained a
dead letter ; but it alarmed the friars, and with reason.
It was the tocsin of their doom, of the downfall of
their establishments, and the ruin of their work.

70 Glimpses of California

Affairs grew more and more unsettled. Spanish
viceroys and Mexican insurgents took turns at ruling
in Mexico, and the representatives of each took turns
at ruling in California. The waves of every Mexican
revolution broke on the California shore. The Col-
lege of San Fernando, in Mexico, also shared in the
general confusion, and many of its members returned
to Spain.

From 1817 to 1820 great requisitions were made
by the Government upon the missions. They re-
sponded generously. They gave not only food, but
money. They submitted to a tax, per capita^ on all
their thousands of Indians, to pay the expenses of a
deputy to sit in the Mexican Congress. They allowed
troops to be quartered in the mission buildings. At
the end of the year 1820 the outstanding drafts on
the Government, in favor of the missions, amounted
to four hundred thousand dollars.

It is impossible, in studying the records of this
time, not to feel that the friars were, in the main,
disposed to work in good faith for the best interests
of the State. That they opposed the secularization
project is true ; but it is unjust to assume that their
motives in so doing were purely selfish. Most cer-
tainly, the results of the carrying out of that project
were such as to prove all that they claimed of its un-
timeliness. It is easy saying, as their enemies do,
that they would never have advocated it, and were
not training the Indians with a view to it : but the
first assertion is an assumption, and nothing more;

Father yunipero and his IVork ji

and the refutation of the second lies in the fact that
even in that short time they had made the savages into
" masons, carpenters, plasterers, soap-makers, tanners,
shoe-makers, blacksmiths, millers, bakers, cooks, brick-
makers, carters and cart-makers, weavers and spinners,
saddlers, ship hands, agriculturists, herdsmen, vin-
tagers ; in a word, they filled all the laborious occu-
pations known to civilized society." ^ Moreover,
in many of the missions, plots of land had already
been given to individual neophytes who seemed
to have intelligence and energy enough to begin
an independent life for themselves. But it is idle
speculating now as to what would or would not
have been done under conditions which never
existed.

So long as Spain refused to recognize Mexico's in-
dependence, the majority of the friars, as was natural,
remained loyal to the Spanish Government, and
yielded with reluctance and under protest, in every
instance, to Mexico's control. For some years Presi-
dent Sarria was under arrest for refusing to take the
oath of allegiance to the Mexican republic. Never-
theless, it not being convenient to remove him and
fill his place, he performed all his functions as presi-
dent of the missions through that time. Many other
friars refused to take the oath, and left the country
in consequence. During three years the seculariza-
tion project was continually agitated, and at intervals

^ Special Report of the Hon. B. D. Wilson, of Loe Angeles, CaL,
to the Interior Department in 1852.

72 Glimpses of California

measures initiatory to it were decreed and sometimes
acted upon.

The shifting governors of unfortunate California
legislated for or against the mission interests accord-
ing to the exigencies of their needs or the warmness
or lukewarmness of their religious faith.

An act of one year, declaring the Indians liberated,
and ordering the friars to turn over the mission prop-
erties to administrators, would be followed a few
years later by an act restoring the power of the
friars, and giving back to them all that remained to
be rescued of the mission properties and converts.
All was anarchy and confusion. During the fifty-
five years that California was under Spanish rule
she had but nine governors. During the twenty-
four that she was under Mexican misrule she had
thirteen. It would be interesting to know what
the Indian populations thought, as they watched
these quarrellings and intrigues among the Chris-
tians who were held up to them as patterns for
imitation.

In a curious pamphlet left by one of the old friars.
Father Boscana, is told a droll story of the logical
inferences some of them drew from the political sit-
uations among their supposed betters. It was a band
of San Diego Indians. When they heard that the
Spanish viceroy in the city of Mexico had been killed,
and a Mexican made emperor in his place, they forth-
with made a great feast, burned up their chief, and
elected a new one in his stead. To the stringent

Father yunipero and his IVork 73

reproofs of the horrified friars they made answer:
" Have you not done the same in Mexico ? You say
your king was not good, and you killed him. Well,
our captain was not good, and we burned him. If
the new one turns out bad, we will burn him too," —
a memorable instance of the superiority of example
to precept.

At last, in 1834, the final blow fell on the mis-
sions. The Governor of California, in compliance
with instructions received from Mexico, issued an
authoritative edict for their secularization. It was a
long document, and had many significant provisions
in it. It said that the Indians were now to be
" emancipated. " But the sixteenth article said that
they "should be obliged to join in such labors of
community as are indispensable, in the opinion of the
political chief, in the cultivation of the vineyards,
gardens, and fields, which for the present remain un-
apportioned." This was a curious sort of emancipa-
tion ; and it is not surprising to read, in the political
records of the time, such paragraphs as this : '' Out
of one hundred and sixty Indian families at San
Diego, to whom emancipation was offered by Gover-
nor Figueroa, only ten could be induced to accept
it " The friars were to hand over all records and in-
ventories to stewards or administrators appointed.
Boards of magistrates were also appointed for each
village. One half of the movable property was to be
divided among the "emancipated persons," and to
each head of a family was to be given four hundred

Father yunipero and his IVork 75

erly for the support of the father or fathers left in
charge of the church, the church properties, and the
souls of the " emancipated persons." A more com-
plete and ingenious subversion of the previously ex-
isting state of things could not have been devised ;
and it is hard to conceive how any student of the his-
tory of the period can see, in its shaping and sudden
enforcing, anything except bold and unprincipled
greed hiding itself under specious cloaks of right.
Says Dwinelle, in his " Colonial History " : —

'* Beneath these specious pretexts was undoubtedly a
perfect understanding between the Government of Mex-
ico and the leading men in California, that in such a
condition of things the Supreme Government might ab-
sorb the Pious Fund, under the pretence that it was no
longer necessary for missionary purposes, and thus had
reverted to the State as a quasi escheat, while the co-
actors in California should appropriate the local wealth
of the missions by the rapid and sure process of admin-
istering their temporalities/'

Of the manner in which the project was executed,
Dwinelle goes on to say : —

" These laws, whose ostensible purpose was to con-
vert the missionary establishments into Indian pueblos,
their churches into parish churches, and to elevate the
Christianized Indians to the rank of citizens, were after
all executed in such a manner that the so-called secu-
larization of the missions resulted in their plunder and
complete ruin, and in the demoralization and dispersion
of the Christianized Indians."

Glimpses of California

It ia only just to remember, however, that these
laws and measures were set in force in a time of rev-
olution, when even the best measures and laws could
have small chance of being fairly executed, and that
a government which is driven, as Mexico was, to re-
cruiting ita colonial forces by batches of selected
prison convicts, is entitled to pity, if not charity, in
our estimates of its conduct. Of course, the posi-
tion of administrator of a mission became at once a
political rewai-d and a chance for big gains, and
simply, therefore, a source and centre of bribery and
corruption.

Between the governors — who now regarded the
mission establishments as State property, taking their
cattle or grain as freely as they would any other rev-
enue, and sending orders to a mission for tallow as
they would draw checks on the treasury — and the
administrator, who equally regarded them as easy
places for the filling of pockets, the wealth of the
missions disappeared as dew melts in the sun.
Through all this the Indians were the victiiuB,
They wei-e, under the administrators, compelled to
work far harder than before ; they were ill-fed and
ill-treated ; they were hired out in gangs to work in
towns or on fanna, under masters who regarded them
simply as beasts of burden; their rights to the plots
of land which had been set off for them were, almost
without exception, ignored. A more pitiable sight
has not often been seen on earth than the spectacle
of this great body of helpless, dependent creatures,

Father yunipero and his IVork 77

suddenly deprived of their teachers and protectors,
thrown on their own resources, and at the mercy of
rapacious and unscrupulous communities, in time of
revolution. The best comment on their sufferings
is to be found in the statistics of the mission estab-
lishments after a few years of the administrators'
reign.

In 1834 there were, according to the lowest esti-
mates, from fifteen to twenty thousand Indians in the
missions. De Mofras's statistics give the number as
30,620. In 1840 there were left, all told, but six
thousand. In many of the missions there were less
than one hundred. According to De Mofras, the
cattle, sheep, horses, and mules, in 1834, numbered
808,000 ; in 1842, but 6,320. Other estimates put
the figures for 1834 considerably lower. It is not
easy to determine which are true ; but the most mod-
erate estimates of all tell the story with sufficient em-
phasis. There is also verbal testimony on these
points still to be heard in California, if one has pa-
tience and interest enough in the subject to listen to
it. There are still living, wandering about, half
blind, half starved, in the neighborhood of the mis-
sion sites, old Indians who recollect the mission times
in the height of their glory. Their faces kindle with
a sad flicker of recollected happiness, as they tell of
the dajrs when they had all they wanted to eat, and
the padres were so good and kind : " Bueno tiempo 1
Bueno tiempo ! " they say, with a hopeless sigh and
shake of the head.

Glimpses of California

Under the uew regime the friars Buffered hardly less
than the Indians. Some fled the country, unable to
bear the humiliations and hardships of their positions
under the control of the administrators or majors-
domo, anfl dependent on their caprice for shelter and
even for food. Among this number was Father An-
tonio Peyri, who had been for over thirty years in
charge of the splendid mission of San Luis Rey. In
1800, two years after its founding, this mission had
369 Indiana. In 1827 it had 2,686; it owned over
twenty thousand head of cattle, and nearly twenty
thousand sheep. It controlled over two hundred
thousand acres of land, and there were raised in its
fields in one year three thousand bushels of wheat,
six thousand of barley, and ten thousand of com.
No other mission had so fine a church. It was one
hundred and sixty feet long, fifty wide, and sixty
high, with walls four feet thick. A tower at one
side held a belfry for eight hells. The corridor on
the opposite side had two hundred and fifty-six
arches. Its gold and silver ornaments are said to
have been superb.

When Father Peyri made up his mind to leave the
country, he slipped off by night to San Diego, hoping
to escape without the Indians' knowledge. But,
missing him in the morning, and knowing only too
well what it meant, five hundi'ed of them mounted
their ponies in hot haste, and galloped all tlie way to
San Diego, forty-five miles, to being him back by
force. They arrived just as the ship, with Father

Father yunipero and his IVork 79

Peyri on board, was weighing anchor. Standing on
the deck, with outstretched arms he blessed them,
amid their tears and loud cries. Some flung them-
selves into the water and swam after the ship. Four
reached it, and clinging to its sides, so implored to be
taken that the father consented, and carried them
with him to Rome, where one of them became a
priest.

There were other touching instances in which the
fathers refused to be separated from their Indian
converts, and remained till the last by their side,
sharing all their miseries and deprivations. De
Mofras, in his visit to the country in 1842, found, at
the mission of San Luis Obispo, Father Azagonais, a
very old man, living in a hut, like the Indians, sleep-
ing on a rawhide on the bare ground, with no drink-
ing-vessel but an ox-horn, and no food but some dried
meat hanging in the sun. The little he had he
shared with the few Indians who still lingered there.
Benevolent persons had offered him asylum ; but he
refused, saying that he would die at his post. At the
San Antonio mission De Mofras found another aged
friar, Father Gutierrez, living in great misery. The
administrator of this mission was a man who had
been formerly a menial servant in the establishment ;
he had refused to provide Father Gutierrez with the
commonest necessaries, and had put him on an allow-
ance of food barely sufficient to keep him alive.

At Soledad was a still more pitiful case. Father
Sarria, who had labored there for thirty years, re-

8o Glimpses of California

fused to leave the spot, even after the mission was
so mined that it was not worth any administrator's
while to keep it. He and the handful of Indians
who remained loyal to their faith and to him lived on
there, growing poorer and poorer each day ; he shar-
ing his every morsel of food with them, and starving
himself, till, one Sunday morning, saying mass at the
crumbling altar, he fainted, fell forward, and died
in their arms, of starvation. This was in 1838.
Only eight years before, this Soledad mission had
owned thirty-six thousand cattle, seventy thousand
sheep, three hundred yoke of working oxen, more
horses than any other mission, and had an aqueduct,
fifteen miles long, supplying water enough to irrigate
twenty thousand acres of land.

For ten years after the passage of the Seculariza-
tion Act, affairs went steadily on irom bad to worse
with the missions. Each governor had his own plans
and devices for making the most out of them, rent-
ing them, dividing them into parcels for use of col-
onists, establishing pueblos on them, maxing them
subject to laws of bankruptcy, and finally selling
them. The departmental assemblies sometimes in-
dorsed and sometimes annulled the acts of the gov-
ernors. In 1842 Governor Micheltorena proclaimed
that the twelve southern missions should be restored
to the Church, and that the Government would not
make another grant of land without the consent of the
friara. This led to a revolution, or rather an ebulli-
tion, and Micheltorena was sent out of the country.

Father yunipero and his IVork 83

To him succeeded Pio Pico, who remained in power
till the occupation of California by the United States
forces in 1846. During the reign of Pio Pico, the
ruin of the mission establishments was completed.
They were at first sold or rented in batches to the
highest bidders. There was first a preliminary farce
of proclamation to the Indians to return and take
possession of the missions if they did not want
them sold. These proclamations were posted up in
the pueblos for months before the sales. In 1844 the
Indians of Dolores, Soledad, San Miguel, La Puris-
sima, and San Rafael^ were thus summoned to
come back to their missions, — a curious bit of half-
conscience-stricken, half-politic recognition of the
Indians' ownership of the lands, the act of the De-
partmental Assembly saying that if they (the Indians)
did not return before such a date, the Government
would declare said missions to be " without owner,"
and dispose of them accordingly. There must have
been much bitter speech in those days when news
of these proclamations reached the wilds where the
mission Indians had taken refuge.

At last, in March, 1846, an act of the Departmen-
tal Assembly made the missions liable to the laws of
bankruptcy, and authorized the governor to sell them
to private persons. As by this time all the missions
that had any pretence of existence left had been run

^ The missions of San Rafael and San Francisco de Solano were
the last founded ; the first in 1819, and the latter in 1823, — too late to
attain any great snccess or importance.

Glimpses of California

bopeleasly into debt, proceedings iii i-egard to them
were much simplified by this act. Jn the same year
the President of Mexico issued an order to Guveraor
Pico to use all means within his power to raise money
to defend the country against the United States ; and
under color of tliis double authorization the governor
forthwith proceeded to sell missions right and left.
He sold them at illegal private sales ; he sold them
for insignificaut sums, and for sums not paid at all ;
whether he was, to use the words of a well-known
legal brief in one of the celebrated California land
cases, " wilfully ignorant or grossly corrupt," there
is no knowing, and it made no difference in the
result

One of the last acts of the Departmental Assembly,
before tlie surrender of the country, was to declare
all Governor Pico's sales of mission property null
and void; and one of Governor Pico's last acts was,
as soon as he had luade up his mind to run away out
of the country, to write to some of his special friendfl
and ask them if there were anything else they would
like to have him give them before his departure.

On the 7th of July, 1846. the American flag was
raised in Monterey, and formal possession of California
was taken by the United States. The proclamation of
Admiral Sloat on this memorable occasion included
these words : " AH pereons holding title to real estate,
or in quiet possession of lands under color of right,
shall have those titles and rights guaranteed to them."
" Color of right " is a legal phrase, embodying a moral

Father yunipero and his IVork 85

idea, an obligation of equity. If the United States
Government had kept this guarantee, there would be

living in comfortable homesteads in California to-day
many hundreds of people that are now homeless and
beggared, — Mexicans as well as Indians.

The army officers in charge of different posts in
California, in these first days of the United States'
occupation of the country, were perplexed and em-
barrassed by nothing so much as by the confusion
existing in regard to the mission properties and
lands. Everywhere men turned up with bills of sale
from Governor Pico. At the San Diego mission the
ostensible owner, one Estudillo by name, confessed
frankly that he " did not think it right to dispose of
the Indians' property in that way ; but as everybody
was buying missions, he thought he might as well
have one."

In many of the missions, squatters, without show
or semblance of title, were found ; these the officers
turned out. Finally, General Kearney, to save the
trouble of cutting any more Gordian knots, declared
that all titles of missions and mission lands must be
held in abeyance till the United States Government
should pronounce on them.

For several years the question remained unsettled,
and- the mission properties were held by those who
had them in possession at the time of the surrender.
But in 1856 the United States Land Commission
gave, in reply to a claim and petition from the
Catholic Bishop of California, a decision which, con-

" 86 Glimpses of California ^|

Hidered with reference to the situation of the mission H
properties at the time of the United States' posses- H
H aion, waa perhaps as near to being equitable as the H
I^H circumstances would admit liut, considered with H
^^H reference to the status of the raission establishments H
^^^^^^ under the Spanish rule, to their original extent, H
^^^^^^L the scope of the H

work, and the mag- H
nificent success of H
t!i(.-ir experiment up H
to the time of the H
rt-vohitions, itseema H
a sadly inadequate H
return of property 1
once rightfully held.
Still, it was not
the province of the
United States to re-
pair the injustices
or make good the
thefts of Spain and

^^P 0(rfiX»ronrfCon-idord«il«,SanJiwn Mexico; and any
^^H attempt to clear up
^^1 the tangle of confiscations, debts, frauds, and rob-
^^H beries in California, for the last quarter of a century
^^H before the surrender, would have been bootless work.
^^^H The Land Commissioner's decision was based on
^^H the old Spanish law which divided church property
^^H into two classes, sacred and ecclesiastical, and held
^^^^^^ it to be inalienable, except in case of necessity,

Father yunipero and his IVork 87

and then only according to provisions of canon law ;
in the legal term, it was said to be " out of com-
merce." The sacred property was that which had
been in a formal manner consecrated to God, — church
buildings, sacred vessels, vestments, etc. Ecclesi-
astical property was land held by the Church, and
appropriated to the maintenance of divine worship,
or the support of the ministry; buildings occupied
by the priests, or necessary for their convenience;
gardens, etc. Following a similar division, the prop-
erty of the mission establishments was held by the
Land Commission to be of two sorts, — mission prop-
erty and church property: the mission property,
embracing the great tracts of land formerly cultivated
for the community's purpose, it was decided, must
be considered as Government property; the church
property, including, with the church buildings,
houses of priests, etc., such smaller portions of
land as were devoted to the immediate needs of
the ministry, it was decided must still rightfully
go to the Church. How many acres of the old
gardens, orchards, vineyards, of the missions could
properly be claimed by the Church under this head,
was of course a question ; and it seems to have been
decided on very different bases in different missions,
as some received much more than others. But all
the church buildings, priests' houses, and some acres
of land, more or less, with each, were pronounced
by this decision to have been " before the treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo solemnly dedicated to the use

88 Glimpses of California

of the Cliiirch, and therefore withdrawn from com-
merce ; " " such an interest is protected by the pro-
TiBionB of the treaty, and must be held inviolate under
our lawa." Thus were returned at last, into the
inalienable possession of the Catholic Church, all
that were left of the old mission churches, and
some fiagmenta of the misaion lands. Many of
them are still in operation as curacies ; others are
in ruins; of some not a trace is left,- — not even
a stone.

At San Diego the walls of the old church are still
standing, unroofed, and crumbling daily. It was
used as a cavalry baiTacks during the war of 1846,
and has been a sheepfold since. Opposite it is an
olive orchard, of superb hoary ti-eea still in bearing ;
a cactus wall twenty feet high, and a cluster of date
palms, are all that remain of the friars' garden.

At San Juan Capistrano, the next mission to the
north, some parts of the buildings are still habitable.
Service is held regularly in one of the small chapels.
The priest lives there, and ekes out his little income
by renting some of the mouldering rooms. The church
is a splendid ruin. It was of stone, a hundred and
fifty feet long by a hundred in width, with walls five
feet thick, a dome eighty feet h^h, and a fine belfry
of arches in which four bells rang. It was thrown
down by an earthquake in 1812, on the day of the
Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Morning mass
was going on, and the church was thronged ; thirty
persona were killed, and many mote injured.

Father yunipero and his IVork 91

The little hamlet of San Juan Capistrano lies in
harbor, as it were, looking out on its glimpse of sea,
between two low spurs of broken and rolling hills,
which in June are covered with shining yellow and
blue and green, iridescent as a peacock's neck. It is
worth going across the continent to come into the
village at sunset of a June day. The peace, silence,
and beauty of the spot are brooded over and dom-
inated by the grand gray ruin, lifting the whole scene
into an ineffable harmony. Wandering in room after
room, court after court, through corridors with red-
tiled roofs and hundreds of broad Roman arches, over
fallen pillars, and through carved doorways, whose
untrodden thresholds have sunk out of sight in sum-
mer grasses, one asks himself if he be indeed in
America. On the interior walls are still to be seen
spaces of brilliant fresco- work, in Byzantine patterns
of superb red, pale green, gray, and blue ; and the
corridors are paved with tiles, large and square. It
was our good fortune to have with us, in San Juan
Capistrano, a white-haired Mexican who in his boy-
hood bad spent a year in the mission. He remem-
bered as if it were yesterday its bustling life of fifty
years ago, when the arched corridor ran unbroken
around the great courtyard, three hundred feet square,
and was often filled with Indians, friars, officers, and
gay Mexican ladies looking on at a bull-fight in the
centre. He remembered the splendid library, filled
from ceiling to floor with books, extending one whole
side of the square ; in a comer, where had been the

Glimpses of California

room In which he used to see sixty Indian women weav-
ing at looms, we stood ankle-deep in furzy weeds and
grass. He showed us the doorway, now closed up,
which led into the friars' parlor. To this door, every
Sunday, after mass, came the Indians, in long proces-
sions, to get their weekly gifts. Each one received
sometliing, — a handkerchief, drees, trinket, or money.
While their gifts were being distributed, a band of
ten or twelve performers, all Indians, played lively
airs on brass and stringed instruments. In a little
baptistery, dusky with cobweb and mould, we found
huddled a group of wooden statues of saints, which
once stood in niches in the church ; on their heads
were fuded and brittle wreaths, left from the last oc-
casion on which they had done duty. One had lost
an eye ; another a hand. The gilding and covering
of their robes were dimme'd and defaced. Bnt they
had a dignity which nothing conld destroy. The
contours were singularly expressive and fine, and the
rendering of the drapery was indeed wonderful, —
flowing robes and gathered and lifted mantles, all
, carved in solid wood.

There are statues of this sort to be seen in several
of the old mission churches. They were all carved
by the Indians, many of whom showed great talent in
that direction. There is also in the oifice of the
justice — or alcalde, as he is stdl called — of San Juan
Capiatrano, a carved chair of noticeably bold and
graceful design made by Indian workmen. A few
tatters of heavy crimson brocade hang on it still, relics

Father yunipero and his IVork 93

of the time when it formed part of a gorgeous para-
phernalia and service.

Even finer than the ruins of San Juan Capistrano
are those of the church at San Luis Rey. It has a
perfectly proportioned dome over the chancel, and
beautiful groined arches on either hand and over the
altar. Four broad pilasters on each side of the church
are frescoed in a curious mixing of blues, light and
dark, with reds and black, which have faded and
blended into a delicious tone. A Byzantine pulpit
hanging high on the wall, and three old wooden stat-
ues in niches, are the only decorations left. Piles of
dirt and rubbish fill the space in front of the altar,
and grass and weeds are growing in the corners;
great flocks of wild doves live in the roof, and
have made the whole place unclean and foul-aired.
An old Mexican, eighty years old, a former ser-
vant of the mission, has the ruin in charge, and
keeps the doors locked still, as if there were
treasure to guard. The old man is called " alcalde '*
by the village people, and seems pleased to be so ad-
dressed. His face is like wrinkled parchment, and
he walks bent into a parenthesis, but his eyes are
bright and young. As he totters along, literally
holding his rags together, discoursing warmly of the
splendors he recollects, he seems indeed a ghost from
the old times.

The most desolate ruin of all is that of La
Purissima Mission. It is in the Lompoc valley, two
days' easy journey north of Santa Barbara. Nothing

Glimpses of Califoynia

is left there but one long, low adobe building, with a
few arches of the corridor ; the doors stand open, the
roof is falling in : it has been so often used as a
stable and sheepfold, that even the grasses are killed
around it. The painted pulpit hangs half falling on
the wall, its stiirs are gone, and its sounding-board
is slanting awry. Inside the broken altar-rail is a
pile of stones, earth, and rubbish tlu"own up by seekers
after buried treasures ; in the farther corner another
pile and hole, the home of a badger ; mud-awallows'
nests are thick on the cornice, and cobwebbed rags of
the old canvas ceiling hang fluttering overhead. The
only trace of the ancient cultivation is a pear-orchard
a few rods off, which must have been a splendid sight
in ita day ; it is at least two hundred yards square,
with a double row of trees all around, so placed as to
leave between them a walk fifty or sixty feet wide.
Bits of broken aqueduct here and there, and a large,
round stone tank overgrown by gi-ass, showed where
the life of the orchard used to flow in. It has been
many years slowly dying of thirst. Many of the trees
are gone, and those that remain stretch out gaunt and
shrivelled boughs, which, though still bearing fruit,
look like arms tossing in vain reproach and entreaty ;
a few pinched little blossoms seemed to heighten
rather than lessen their melancholy look.

At San Juan Bautista there lingers more of the at^
mosphere of the olden time than is to be found in any
other place in California, The mission church is well
preserved ; its grounds are enclosed and cared for ;

Father yunipero and Ms Work 97

in its garden are Btill blooming roaea and Tines, in
the shelter of palma, and with the old stone sun-dial
to tell time. In the sacristy are oak chests, full of
gorgeous vestmeuta of brocades, with silver and gold
laces. On one of these robes is an interesting relic.
A lost or worn-out silken tassel had been replaced by
the patient Indian workers with one of fine-shredded
rawhide; the shreds wound with silver wire, and
twisted into tiny rosettes and loops, closely imitating
the silver device. The church fronts south, on a little
green-locust walled plaza, — the sleepiest, sunniest,
dreamiest place in the world. To the east the land
falls off abruptly, so that the paling on that side of
the plaza is outlined against the sky, and its little
locked gate looks as if it would open into the heavens.
The mission buildings used to surround this plaza;
after the friars' day came rich men living there ; and
a charming inn is kept now in one of theu- old adobe
houses. On the east side of the church is a succession
of three terraces leading down to a valley. On the
upper one is the old graveyard, in which it is said
there are sleeping four thousand Indians.

In 1825 there were spoken at this mission thirteen
different Indian dialects.

Just behind the church is an orphan girls' school,
kept by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. At six
o'clock every morning the bells of the church ring
for mass as they used to ring when over a thousand
Indiana flocked at the summons. To-day, at the
Bound, there comes a procession of little girls and

gS Glimpses of California

young maidens, the black-robed sisters walking before
theai witb crossed hands and placid faces. One or
two Mexican women, with shawls over their heads,
steal acroBs the faint paths of the plaza, and enter
the church.

I shall always recollect the morning when I went,
too. The silence of the plaza was in itaelf a memo-
rial service, with locust blossoms swinging incense.
It was barely dawn in the church. As the shrill yet
Bweet childish voices lifted up the strains of the
Kyrie Eleison, I seemed to see the face of Father
Junipero in the dim hghted cliancel, and the bene-
diction was as solemn as if he himself had spoken it.
Why the little town of San Juan Bautista continues
to exist is a marvel. It is shut out and cut off from
everything ; only two or three hundred souls are left
in it ; its streets are grass-grown ; half its houses are
empty. But it has a charm of sun, valley, hill, and
seaward oEf-Iook unsurpassed in all California. Lin-
gering out a peaceful century there are many old men
and women, whose memories are like magic glasses,
reproducing the pictures of the past. One such we
found: a Mexican woman eighty-five years old, portly,
jolly, keen-toiigued, keen-eyed ; the widow of one of the
soldiers of the old mission guard. She had had twelve
children ; she had never been ill a week in her Ufe ; she
is now the village nurse, and almost doctor. Sixty
years back she I'ememhered. " The Indians used to be
in San Juan Bautista like sheep," she said, " by the
thousand and thousand." They were always good,

Father yunipero and his IVork 99

and the padres were alwaye kind. Fifty oxen were

killed for food every eight days, and everybody had
all he wanted to eat. There waa much more water
then than now, plenty of rain, and the streams always
full. " I don't know whether you or Ave were bad,
that it has been taken away by God," she said, with a
quick glance, half humorous, half antagonistic.

The Santa Barbara Mission is still in the charge of
Franciscans, the only one remaining in their posses-
sion. It is now ealled a college for apostolic mission-
ary work, and there are living within its walls eight
members of the order. One of them is veiy old, — a
friar of the ancient rigime; his benevolent face is
well known throughout the country, and there are in
many a town and remote hamlet men and women who
wait always for his coming before they will make con-
fession. He is like Saint Francis's first followers : the
obligation.^ of poverty and charity still hold to him
the litenil fulness of the original bond. He gives
away gannent after garment, leaving himself without
protection against cold ; and the brothers are forced
to lock up and hide from him all provisions, or lie
would leave the liouse bare of food. He often kneels
from midnight to dawn on the stone floor of the
church, praying and chanting psalma ; and when a
terrible epidemic of smallpox broke out some yeai-s
ago, he labored day and night, nursing the worst
victims of it, shriving them, and burying them with
his own hands. He is past eighty and has not much
longer to stay. He has outlived many things beside

loo Glmipses of California

his own prime: the day of the sort of faith and
work to which his Bpiiit is attuned has passed by

forever.

The mission buildings stand on high ground, three
miles from the beach, west of the town and above it,
looking to the sea. In tlie morning the sun's first
rays flash full on its front, and at evening they linger
late on its western wall. It is an inalienable bene-
diction to the place. The longer one stays there the
more he is aware of the influence on his soul, as well
as of the importance in the landscape of the benign
and stately edifice.

On the coiTidor of the inner court hangs a bell
which is rung for the hours of the daily offices and sec-
ular duties. It is also struck whenever a friar dies, to
announce that all is over. It is the duty of the brother
who has watched the last breath of the dying one to go
immediately and strike tliis bell. Its sad note has
echoed many times through the corridoi's. One of
the brothers said, last year, —

" The first time I rang that bell to announce a
death, thei'e were fifteen of us left. Now there are
only eight."

The sentence itself fell on my ear like the note of
a passing-belL It seems a not unfitting last word to
this slight and fragmentary sketoh of the labors of the
Franciscan Order in California.

Still more fitting, however, are the words of a his-
torian who, living in California and thoroughly
knowing its history from first to hist, has borne the

Father yunipero and his Work loi

following eloquent testimony to the friars and their
work : —

'' The results of the mission scheme of Christianization
and colonization were such as to justify the plans of the
wise statesman who devised it, and to gladden the
hearts of the pious men who devoted their lives to its
execution.

" At the end of sixty years the missionaries of Upper
California found themselves in the possession of twenty-
one prosperous missions, planted on a line of about seven
hundred miles, running from San Diego north to the lat-
itude of Sonoma. More than thirty thousand Indian
converts were lodged in the mission buildings, receiving
religpious culture, assisting at divine worship, and cheer-
fully performing their easy tasks, ... If we ask where
are now the thirty thousand Christianized Indians who
once enjoyed the beneficence and created the wealth of
the twenty-one Catholic missions of California, and then
contemplate the most wretched of all want of systems
which has surrounded them under our own government,
we shall not withhold our admiration from those good
and devoted men who, with such wisdom, sagacity, and
self-sacrifice, reared these wonderful institutions in the
wilderness of California. They at least would have pre-
served these Indian races if they had been left to pursue
unmolested their work of pious beneficence." ^

1 John W. Dwinelle's Colonial History of San Francisco, pp. 44-87.

NoTB. — The anthor desires to express her acknowledgments to
H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, who kindly put at her disposal all
the resources of his invalnable library ; also to the Superior of the
Franciscan College in Santa Barbara, for the loan of important books
and manuscripts and the photograph of Father Junipero.

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE
MISSION INDIANS IN SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA

The old laws of the kingdom of the Indies are
interesting reading, especially those portions of them
relating to Indians. A certain fine and chivalrous
quality of honor toward the helpless and tenderness
toward the dependent runs all through their quaint
and cumbrous paragraphs.

It is not until one studies these laws in connection
with the histoiy of the confusions and revolutions of
the secularization period, and of the American con-
quest of California, that it becomes possible to under-
stand how the California Mission Indians could have
been left so absolutely unprotected, as they were, in
the matter of ownership of the lands they had culti-
vated for sixty years.

"We command," said the Spanish king, "that the
sale, grant, and composition of lands be executed with
such attention that the Indians be left in possession
of the full amount of lands belonging to them, either
singly or in communities, together with their rivers
and waters; and the lands which they shall have

io6 Glimpses of California

drained or otherwise improved, whereby they may by
their own industry have rendered them fertile, are
reserved, in the iirst place, and can in no case be sold
or aliened. And the judges who have been sent
thither shall specify what Indians they may have
found on the land, and what lands they shall have left
in possession of each of the elders of tribes, caciques,
governors, or communities."

Grazing estates for cattle are ordered to be located
"apart from the fields and villages of the Indians."
The king's command is that no sucli estates shall be
granted "in any parts or place where any damage can
accrue to the Indians." Every grant of land must
be made " without prejudice to the Indians ; " and
" such as may have been granted to their prejudice
and injury" must be " restored to whomever they by
right shall belong."

"In order to avoid the inconveniences and damages
resulting from the sale ox gift to Spaniards of tracts
of land to the prejudice of Indians, upon the suspi-
cious testimony of witnesses," the king orders that
all sales and gifts are to be made before the attorneys
of the royal audiencias, and " always with an eye to
the benefit of the Indians ; " and " the king's solicitors
are to be protectors of the Indians and plead for
them." "After distributing to the Indians what they
may justly want to cultivate, sow, and raise cattle,
confirming to them what they now hold, and granting
what they may want besides, all the remaining land
may be reserved to ua," says the old decree, "clear of

Condition of Mission Indians log

any incumbrance, for tiie purpose of being given as
rewards, or disposed of according to our pleasure."

In those days everything in New Spain was thus
ordered by royal decrees. Nobody had grants of
land in the sense in which we use the word. When
the friars wished to reward an industrious and
capable Indian, and test his capacity to take care of
himself and family, by giving him a little farm of hia
own, all they had to do, or did, was to mark oft the
portion of land, put the Indian on it, and tell him it
was his. There would appear to have been little
more formality than this in the establishing of the
Indian pueblos which were formed in the beginning
of the secularization period. Governor Figiieroa, in
an address in 1834, speaks of three of these, San Juan
Capistrano, San Dieguito, and Laa Flores, says that
they are flourishing, and that the comparison between
the condition of these Indians and that of the Spanish
townsmen in the same region is altogether in favor of
the Indians.

On Nov. 16, 1835, eighty-one "desafiliadoB" — aa
the ex-neophytes of missions were called — of the San
Luis Key Mission settled themselves in the San Pas-
qual valley, which was an appanage of that mission.
These Indian communities appear to have had no
documents to show their right, either as commuDities
or individuals, to the land on which they had settled.
At any rate, they had nothing which amounted to a
protection, or stood in the way of settlers who coveted
their landa. It is years since the last trace of the

I lo Glimpses of California

pueblos Las Flores and San Dieguito disappeared;
and the San Pasqual valley is entirely taken up by
white settlers, chiefly on pre-emption claims. San
Juan Capistrano is the only one of the four where are
to be found any Indians' homes. If those who had
banded themselves together and had been set off into
pueblos had no recognizable or defensible title, how
much more helpless and defenceless were individuals,
or small communities without any such semblance of
pueblo organization I

Most of the original Mexican grants included tracts
of land on which Indians were living, sometimes large
villages of them. In many of these grants, in accord-
ance with the old Spanish law or custom, was incor-
porated a clause protecting the Indians. They were
to be left undisturbed in their homes: the portion of
the grant occupied by them did not belong to the
grantee in any such sense as to entitle him to eject
them. The land on which they were living, and the
land they were cultivating at the time of the grant,
belonged to them as long as they pleased to occupy
it. In many of the grants the boundaries of the
Indians* reserved portion of the property were care-
fully marked off; and the instances were rare in
which Mexican grantees disturbed or in any way
interfered with Indians living on their estates. There
was no reason why they should. There was plenty
of land and to spare, and it was simply a convenience
and an advantage to have the skilled and docile
Indian laborer on the ground.

112 Glimpses of California

brought to light the helplessness of the Indiana' posi-
tion. What cared the sharp American for that sen-
timental clause, "without injury to the Indians"?
Not a farthing. Why should he? His government,
before him, had decided that all the lands belonging
to the old missions, excepting the small portions tech-
nically held as church property, and therefore "ont
of commerce," were government lauds. None of the
Indians living on those lands at the time of the Amer-
ican possession were held to have any right — not
even " color of right " — to them. That they and
their ancestors had been cultivating them for tlu-ee
quarters of a century made no difference. Americana
wishing to pre-empt claims on any of tliese so-called
government lands did not regard the presence on
them of Indian families or communities as any more
of a barrier than the presence of so many coyotes or
foxes. They would not hesitate to cei-tify to the land
office that such lands were " unoccupied," Still less,
then, need the purchaser of tracts covered by old
Mexican grants hold himself bound to regard the
poor cumberers of the ground, who, having no legal
right whatever, had been all their years living on the
tolemnce of a silly, good-hearted Mexican proprietor.
The American wanted every rod of his land, every
drop of water on it; his schemes were boundless;
his greed insatiable ; he had no use for Indians.
His plan did not embrace them, and could not enlarge
itself to take them in. They must go. This is, in
brief, the summing up of the way in which has come

Condition of Mission Indians 1 1 3

about the present pitiable state of the California
Mission Indians.

In 1852 a report in regard to thes6 Indians was
made to the Interior Department by the Hon, B. D.
Wilson, of Los Angeles. It is an admirable paper,
clear and exhaustive. Mr. Wilson was an old Cali-
fomian, had known the Indiana well, and had been
eyewitness to much of the cruelty and injustice done
them. He says : —

" In the fall of the missions, accomplished by priratB
cupidity and political ambition, philanthropy lameDts
the failure of one of the grandest experiments ever made
for the elevation of this unfortunate race."

He estimates that there were at that time in the
counties of Tulare, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and
San Diego over fifteen thousand Indians who had
been connected with the missions in those counties.
They were classified as the Tularenos, Cahuillas,
San Luiseilos, and Dieguefios, the latter two being
practically one nation, speaking one language, and
being more generally Christianized than the others.
They furnished, Mr. Wilson says, "the majority of
the laborers, mechanics, and servants of San Diego
and Los Angeles counties." They all spoke the
Spanish language, and a not inconsiderable number
could read and write it. They had built all the
houses in the country, had taught the whites how
to make brick, mud mortar, bow to use asphalt on
roofs ; they understood irrigation, were good herdera,

114

Glimpses of California

reapers, ete. They were paid only half the wagra"
given to whites ; and being immoderate gamblers,
often gambled away on Saturday night and Sunday
all they had earned in the week. At that time in
Los Angeles nearly eveiy other house in town was
a grog-shop for Indians. In the San Pasqual valley
there were twenty white vagabonds, all rumsellers,
squatted at one time around the Indian pueblo. The
Los Angeles ajunlaraiento had passed an edict
declaring that "all Indians without masters" —
significant phrase ! — must live outside the town
limits ; also, that all Indians who could not show
papers from the alcalde of the pueblo in which they
lived, should he treated as "horse thieves and
enemies."

On Sunday nights the squares and streets of Los
Angeles were often to be seen full of Indians lying
about helpless in every stage of intoxication. They
were picked up by scores, unconscious, caiTied to
jail, locked up, and early Monday rnorning hired out
to the highest bidders at the jail gates. Horrible
outrages were committed on Indian women and
children. Id some instances the Indians armed to
avenge these, and were themselves killed.

These are a few out of hundreds of similar items
to be gathered from the newspaper records of the
time. Conditions such as these could have but one
outcome. Twenty years later, when another special
report on the condition of the California Mission
Indians was asked for by the Government, not over

Conditioti of Mission Indians 1 1 5

five thousand IndianB remained, to be reported on.
Vice and cruelty had reaped large harvests each
year. Many of the rich valleys, which at the time
of Mr. Wilson's report had been under cultivation
by Indiana, were now filled by white settlera. the
Indians all gone, no one could tell wliere. In some
instances whole villages of them had been driven off
St once by fraudulently procured and fraudulently
enforced claims. One of the most heartrending of
these eases was that of the Temecula Indians.

The Temecula valley lies in the northeast corner
of San Diego County. It is watered by two streams
and has a good soil. The Southern California Rail-
road now crosses it. It was an appanage of the San
Luis Rey Mission, and the two hundred Indians who
were living there were the children and grand-
childi-en of San Luis Rey neophytes. The greater
part of the valley was under cultivation. They had
cattle, horses, sheep. In 1865 a " special agent " of
the United States Government held a grand Indian
convention there. Eighteen villages were repre-
sented, and the numbers of inhabitants, stock, vine-
yards, orchards, were reported. The Indians were
greatly elated at this evidence of the Government's
good intentions toward them. They set up a tall
liberty-pole, and bringing forth a United States flag,
which they had kept carefully hidden away ever
since the beginning of the civil war, they flung it
out to the winds in token of their loyalty. "It is
astonishing," says one of the San Diego newspapers

ii6 Glimpses of California

of the day, "that these IndianB have behaved so
well, considering the pernicious teachings they have
had from the secessionists in our midst."

There was already anxiety in the minds of the
Temecula Indians as to their title to their lands.
All that was in existence to show that they had any
was the protecting clause in an old Mexican grant.
To be sure, the man was still alive who bad assisted
in mai'ting off the boundaries of their part of this
original Temecula gi-ant ; but his testimony could
establish nothing beyond the letter of the clause as
it stood. They earnestly implored the agent to lay
the case before the Interior Department. Whether
he did or not I do not know, but this is the sequel:
On April 15, 1869, an action was brought in the
District Court, in San Francisco, by five men,
against " Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Hor-
ace Greeley, and one thousand Indians, and other
parties whose names are unknown," It was " a bill
to quit title," an "action to recover possession of
certain real estate bounded thus and thus," It in-
cluded the Temecula valley. It was based on grants
made by Governor Micheltorena in 1844. The de-
fendants cited were to appear in court within twenty
days.

The Indians appealed to the Catholic bishop to
help them. He wrote to one of the judges an im-
ploring letter, saying, " Can you not do something
to save these poor Indians from beijig driven out ? "
But the scheme had been too skilfully plotted.

Condition of Mission Indians 1 1 9

There was no way — or, at any rate, no way was
found — of protecting the Indians. The day came
when a sheriff, bringing a posse of men and a war-
rant which could not be legally resisted, arrived to
eject the Indian families from their houses and drive
them out of the valley. The Indians' first impulse
was as determined as it could have been if they had
been white, to resist the outrage. But on being
reasoned with by friends, who sadly and with shame
explained to them that by thus resisting they would
simply make it the duty of the sheriff to eject them
by force, and, if necessary, shoot down any who
opposed the executing of his warrant, they submitted.
But they refused to lift hand to the moving. They
sat down, men and women, on the ground, and
looked on, some wailing and weeping, some dogged
and silent, while the sheriff and his men took out
of the neat little adobe houses their small stores of
furniture, clothes, and food, and piled them on
wagons to be carried — where? — anywhere the ex-
iles chose, so long as they did not chance to choose
a piece of any white man's land.

A Mexican woman is now living in that Temecula
valley who told me the story of this moving. The
facts I had learned before from records of one sort
and another. But standing on the spot, looking at
the ruins of the little adobe houses, and the walled
graveyard full of graves, and hearing this woman
tell how she kept her doors and windows shut, and
could not bear to look out while the deed was being

1 20 Glimpses of California

done, I realized forcibly how different a thing is

history seen from history written and read.

It took three days to move them. Procession
after procession, with cries and tears, walked slowly
behind the wagons carrying their household goods.
They took the tule roofs off the little houses, and
carried them along. They could be used again.
Some of these Indians, wishing to stay as near as
possible to their old home, settled in a small valley,
only three miles and a half away to the south. It
was a dreary, hot little valley, bare, with low, rocky
buttes cropping out on either side, and with scanty
growths of bushes ; there was not a drop of water in
it. Here the exiles went to work again; built their
huts of reeds and straw ; set up a booth of boughs
for the priest, when he came, to say mass in ; and a
rude wooden cross to consecrate their new graveyard
on a stony hill-side. They put their huts on barren
knolls here and there, where nothing could grow.
On the tillable land they planted wheat or barley or
orchards, — some patches not ten feet square, the
largest not over three or four acres. They hollowed
out the base of one of the rocky buttes, sunk a well
there, and found water.

I think none of us who saw this little refugee vil-
lage will ever f oi^et it. The whole place was a series
of pictures ; and knowing its history, we found in each
low roof and paling the dignity of heroic achievement.
Near many of the huts stood great round baskets
woven of twigs, reaching half-way up to the eaves

Condition of Mission Indians 1 2 1

and looking like huge birds'-nests. These were their
granaries, holding acorns and wheat. Women with
red pottery jars on their heads and on their backs were
going to and from the well ; old men were creeping
about, bent over, carrying loads of fagots that would
have seemed heavy for a donkey ; aged women sitting
on the ground were diligently plaiting baskets, too
busy or too old to give more than a passing look at
us. A group of women was at work washing wool in
great stone bowls, probably hundreds of years old.
The interiors of some of the houses were exquisitely
neat and orderly, with touching attempts at adorn-
ment, — pretty baskets and shelves hanging on the
walls, and over the beds canopies of bright calico.
On some of the beds the sheets and pillow-cases were
trimmed with wide hand-wrought lace, made by the
Indian women themselves. This is one of their arts
which date back to the mission days. Some of the
lace is beautiful and fine, and of patterns like the old
church laces. It was pitiful to see the poor creatures
in almost every one of the hovels bringing out a yard
or two of their lace to sell ; and there was hardly a
house which had not the lace-maker's frame hanging
on the wall, with an unfinished piece of lace stretched
in it. The making of this lace requires much time
and patience. It is done by first drawing out all the
lengthwise threads of a piece of fine linBn or cotton ;
then the threads which are left are sewed over and
over into an endless variety of intricate patterns.
Sometimes the whole design is done in solid button-

122 Glimpses of California

hole stitch, or solid figures are filled in on an open
network made of the threads. The baskets were
finely woven, of good shapes, and excellent decorative
patterns in brown and black on yellow or white.

Every face, except those of the very young, was
sad beyond description. They were stamped indelibly
by generations of suffering, immovable distrust also
imderlying the sorrow. It was hard to make them
smile. To all our expressions of good-will and
interest they seemed indifferent, and received in
silence the money we paid them for baskets and lace.

" The word " Teraecula " is an Indian word, signi-
fying " grief '* or " mourning.'* It seems to have had
a strangely prophetic fitness for the valley to which
it was given.

While I am writing these lines, the news comes
that, by an executive order of the President, the little
valley in which these Indians took refuge has been
set apart for them as a reservation. No doubt they
know how much executive orders creating Indian
reservations are worth. There have been several
such made and revoked in California within their
memories. The San Pasqual valley was at one time
set apart by executive order as a reservation for
Indians. This was in 1870. There were then living
in the valley between two and three hundred Indians ;
some of them had been members of the original
pueblo established there in 1835.

The comments of the California newspapers on this
executive order are amusing, or would be if they did

Condition of Mission Indians 125

not record such tragedy. It was followed by an
outburst of virtuous indignation all along the coast.
One paper said : —

*' The iniquity of this scheme is made manifest when
we state the fact that the Indians of that part of the
State are Mission Indians who are settled in villages
and engaged in farming like the white settlers. ... It
would be gross injustice to the Indians themselves as
well as to the white settlers in San Pasqual. . . . These
Indians are as fixed in their habitations as the whites,
and have fruit-trees, buildings, and other valuable im-
provements to make them contented and comfortable.
Until within the past two or three years they raised
more fruit than the white settlers of the southern
counties. There is belonging to an Indian family there
a fig-tree that is the largest in the State, covering a space
sixty paces in diameter. ... A remonstrance signed by
over five hundred citizens and endorsed by every office-
holder in the county has gone on to Washington against
this swindle. . . . This act on the part of the Grovern-
ment is no better than highway robbery, and the persons
engaged in it are too base to be called men. There is
not a person in either of these valleys that will not be
ruined pecuniarily if tb^se orders are enforced."

Looking through files of newspapers of that time,
I found only one that had the moral courage to up-
hold the measure. That paper said, —

'^ Most of the inhabitants are now Indians who desire
to be protected in their ancient possessions; and the
Government is about to give them that protection, after
a long delay.''

126 Glimpses of California

One editor, having nearly exhausted the resources of
invective and false statement, actually had the hardi-
hood to say that Indians could not be induced to live
on this reservation because "there are no acorn-
bearing trees there, and the acorns furnish their
principal food."

The congressmen and their clients were successful.
The order was revoked. In less than four years the
San Pasqual Indians are heard from again. A jus-
tice of the peace in the San Pasqual valley writes to
the district attorney to know if anything can be
done to protect these Indians.

" Last year," he says, " the heart of this rancheria
(village) was filed on and pre-empted. The settlers
are beginning to plough up the land. The Los
Angeles Land Office has informed the Indians that,
not being citizens, they cannot retain any claim. It
seems very hard," says the judge, " aside from the
danger of difficulties likely to arise from it."

About this time a bill introduced in Congress to
provide homes for the Mission Indians on the reser-
vation plan was reported unfavorably upon by a
Senate committee, on the ground that all the Mission
Indians were really American citizens. The year
following, the chief of the Pala Indians, being
brought to the county clerk's office to register as a
voter, was refused on the ground that, being an
Indian, he was not a citizen. In 1850 a small band
of Indians living in San Diego County were taxed to
the amount of six hundred dollars, which they paid.

Condition of Mission Indians 127

the sheriff said, "without a murmur." The next
year they refused. The sheriff wrote to the district
attorney, who replied that the tax must be paid.
The Indians said they had no money. They had
only bows, arrows, wigwams, and a few cattle.
Finally, they were compelled to drive in enough of
their cattle to pay the tax. One of the San Diego
newspapers spoke of the transaction as "a small
business to undertake to collect taxes from a parcel
of naked Indians."

The year before these events happened a special
agent, John G. Ames, had been sent out by the
Government to investigate and report upon the con-
dition of the Mission Indians. He had assured them
" of the sincere desire of the Government to secure
their rights and promote their interests, and of its
intention to do whatever might be found practicable
in this direction." He told them he had been " sent
out by the Government to hear their story, to
examine carefully into their condition, and to rec-
ommend such measures as seemed under the circum-
stances most desirable."

Mr. Ames found in the San Pasqual valley a white
man who had just built for himself a good house,
and claimed to have pre-empted the greater part of
the Indians' village. He "had actually paid the
price of the land to the register of the land office of
the district, and was daily expecting the patent from
Washington. He owned that it was hard to wrest
from these well-disposed and industrious creatures

Condition of Mission Indians 129

Government at Washington, has resulted in an ag-
gregate of monstrous injustice, which no one can
fully realize without studying the facts on the
ground. In the winter of 1882 I visited this San
Pasqual valley. I drove over from San Diego with
the Catholic priest, who goes there three or four
Sundays in a year, to hold service in a little adobe
chapel built by the Indians in the days of their
prosperity. This beautiful valley is from one to
three miles wide, and perhaps twelve long. It is
walled by high-rolling, soft-contoured hills, which are
now one continuous wheat-field. There are, in sight
of the chapel, a dozdn or so adobe houses, many of
which were built by the Indians ; in all of them ex-
cept one are now living the robber whites, who have
driven the Indians out ; only one Indian still remains
in the valley. He earns a meagre living for himself
and family by doing day's work for the farmers who
have taken his land. The rest of the Indians are
hidden away in the cafions and rifts of the near hills,
— wherever they can find a bit of ground to keep a
horse or two and raise a little grain. . They have
sought the most inaccessible spots, reached often by
miles of difficult trail. They have fled into secret
lairs like hunted wild beasts. The Catholic priest of
San Diego is much beloved by them. He has been
their friend for many years. When he goes to hold
service, they gather from their various hiding-places
and refuges ; sometimes, on a special fHe day, over
two hundred come. But on the day I was there,

1 30 Glimpses of California

the priest being a young man who was a stranger to
them, only a few were present. It was a pitiful
sight Tlie dilapidated adobe building, empty and
comfortless ; the ragged poverty-stricken creatures,
kneeling on the bare ground, — a few Mexicans,
with some gaudiness of attire, setting off the Indians'
poverty still more. In front of the chapel, on a
rough cross-beam supported by two forked posts, set
awry in the ground, swung a bell bearing the date of
1770. It was one of the bells of the old San Diego
Mission. Sttmding bareheaded, the priest rang it
long and loud : he rang it several times before the
leisurely groups that were plainly to be seen in
doorways or on roadsides bestirred themselves to
make any haste to come. After the service I had a
long talk, through an interpreter, with an aged
Indian, the oldest now living in the county. He is
said to be considerably over a hundred, and his looks
corroborate the statement. He is almost blind, and
has snow-white Iiair, and a strange voice, a kind of
shrill whisper. He says he recollects the rebuilding
of the San Diego Mission; though he Avas a very
little boy then, he helped to carry the mud mortar.
This was one hundred and three years ago. In-
stances of much greater longevity than this, however,
are not uncommon among the California Indians. I
asked if he had a good time in the mission. " Yes,
yes," he said, turning his sightless eyes up to the
sky; "much good time," "plenty to eat," "a^oZe,"
^^pozzole^^ " meat ; " now, " no meat ; " " all the time

- tf hlk_ «.^^

Condition of Mission Indians 133

to beg, beg ; " " all the time hungry." His wife, who
is older than he, is still living, though "her hair
is not so white." She was ill, and was with relatives
far away in the mountains ; he lifted his hand and
pointed in the direction of the place. " Much sick,
much sick ; she will never walk any more," he said,
with deep feeling in his voice.

During the afternoon the Indians were continu-
ally coming and going at the shop connected with
the inn where we had stopped, some four miles from
the valley. The keeper of the shop and inn said
he always trusted them. They were "good pay."
" Give them their time and they '11 always pay ; and
if they die their relations will pay the last cent."
Some of them he would " trust any time as high as
twenty dollars." When 1 asked him how they
earned their money, he seemed to have no very dis-
tinct idea. Some of them had a little stock; they
might now and then sell a horse or a cow, he said ;
they hired as laborers whenever they could get a
chance, working at sheep-shearing in the spring and
autumn, and at grape-picking in the vintage season.
A few of them had a little wheat to sell ; sometimes
they paid him in wheat. There were not nearly so
many of them, however, as there had been when he
first opened his shop ; not half so many, he thought.
Where had they gone ? He shrugged his shoulders.
" Who knows ? " he said.

The most wretched of all the Mission Indians now,
however, are not these who have been thus driven

134 Glimpses of California

into hill fastnesses and waterless valleys to wrest a
living where white men would starve. There is in
their fate the climax of misery, but not of degrada-
tion. The latter cannot be reached in the wilderness.
It takes the neighborhood of the white man to ac-
complish it. On the outskirts of the town of San
Diego are to be seen, here and there, huddled groups
of what, at a distance, might be taken for piles of
refuse and brush, old blankets, old patches of sail-
cloth, old calico, dead pine boughs, and sticks all
heaped together in shapeless mounds; hollow, one
perceives on coming nearer them, and high enough
for human beings to creep under. These are the
homes of Indians. I have seen the poorest huts of
the most poverty-stricken wilds in Italy, Bavaria,
Norway, and New Mexico; but never have I seen
anything, in shape of shelter for human creatures, so
loathsome as the kennels in which some of the San
Diego Indians are living. Most of these Indians are
miserable, worthless beggars, drunkards of course,
and worse. Even for its own sake, it would seem
that the town would devise some scheme of help and
redemption for such outcasts. There is a school in
San Diego for the Indian children ; it is supported in
part by the Government, in part by charity; but
work must be practically thrown away on children
that are to spend eighteen hours out of the twenty-
four surrounded by such filth and vice.

Coming from the study of the records of the old
mission times, with the picture fresh and vivid of the

Condition of Mission Indians 137

tranquil industry and comfort of the Indians* lives in
the mission establishments, one gazes with double
grief on such a spectacle as this. Some of these
Indian hovels are within a short distance of the beach
where the friars first landed, in 1769, and began their
work. No doubt, Father Junipero and Father Crespf,
arm in arm, in ardent converse, full of glowing antici-
pation of the grand future results of their labors,
walked again and again, up and down, on the very
spot where these miserable wretches are living to-
day. One cannot fancy Father Junipero's fiery
soul, to whatever far sphere it may have been trans-
lated, looking down on this ruin without pangs
of indignation.

There are still left in the mountain ranges of South
California a few Indian villages which will probably,
for some time to come, preserve their independent
existence. Some of them number as many as two or
three hundred inhabitants. Each has its chief, or, as
he is now called, " capitan." They have their own
system of government of the villages ; it is autocratic,
but in the main it works well. In one of these vil-
lages, that of the Cahuillas, situated in the San Jacinto
range, is a school whose teacher is paid by the United
States Government. She is a widow with one little
daughter. She has built for herself a room adjoining
the school-house. In this she lives alone, with her
child, in the heart of the Indian village ; there is not
a white person within ten miles. She says that the
village is as well-ordered, quiet, and peaceable as it

138 Glimpses of California

is possible for a village to be ; and she feels far safer,
surrounded by these three hundred Cahuillas, than
she would feel in most of the California towns. The
Cahuillas (pronounced Kaweeyahs) were one of the
fiercest and most powerful of the tribes. The name
signifies " master," or " powerful nation." A great
number of the neophytes of the San Gabriel Mission
were from this tribe ; but a large proportion of them
were never attached to any mission.

Their last great chief, Juan Antonio, died twenty
years ago. At the time of the Mexican War he
received the title of General from General Kearney,
and never afterward appeared in the villages of the
whites without some fragmentary attempts at military
uniform. He must have been a grand character, with
all his barbarism. He ruled his band like an emperor,
and never rode abroad without an escort of from
twenty to thirty men. When he stopped one of his
Indians ran forward, bent down, took off his spurs,
then, kneeling on all-fours, made of his back a stool,
on which Juan stepped in dismounting and mounting.
In 1850 an Indian of this tribe, having murdered
another Indian, was taken prisoner by the civil au-
thorities and carried to Jurupa to be tried. Before
the proceedings had begun, Juan, with a big follow-
ing of armed Indians, dashed up to the court-house,
strode in alone, and demanded that the prisoner be
surrendered to him.

" I come not here as a child," he said. " I wish to
punish my people my own way. If they deserve

Condition of Mission Indians 139

hanging, I will hang them. If a white man de-
serves hanging, let the white man hang him. I
am done."

The prisoner was given up. The Indians strapped
him on a horse, and rode back to their village, where,
in an open gi-ave, the body of the murdered man had
been laid. Into this grave, on the top of the corpse
of his victim, Juan Antonio, with his own hands,
flung the murderer alive, and ordered the grave in-
stantly filled up with earth.

There are said to have been other instances of his
dealings with offenders nearly as summary and severe
as this. He is described as looking like an old African
lion, shaggy and fierce; but he was always cordial
and affectionate in his relations with the whites. He
died in 1863, of smallpox, in a terrible epidemic
which carried off thousands of Indians.

This Cahuilla village is in a small valley, high up
in the San Jacinto range. The Indians are very poor,
but they are industrious and hard-working. The
men raise stock, and go out in bands as sheep-shearers
and harvesters. The women make baskets, lace, and
from the fibre of the yucca plant beautiful and dur-
able mats, called "cocas," which are much sought
after by California ranchmen as saddle-mats. The
yucca fibres are soaked and beaten like flax ; some
are dyed brown, some bleached white, and the two
woven together in a great variety of patterns.

In the San Jacinto valley, some thirty miles south
of these Cahuillas, is another Indian village called

140 Glimpses of California

Saboba. Tliese Indians have occupied and cultivated
this ground since the days of the missions. They
have good adobe houses, many acres of wheat-fields,
little peach and apricot oraharda, irrigating ditches,
and some fences. In one of the houses I found a
neatly laid wooden floor, a sewing-machine, and the
walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated news-
papers which had been given to them by the school
teacher. There is a Government school here, num-
bering from twenty to thirty; the children read as
well as average white children of their age, and in
manners and in apparent iiitfirest in their studies
were far above the average of children in the public
schools,

One of the colony schemes, so common now in
California, has been formed for the opening up and
settling of the San Jacinto valley. This Indian
village will be in the colony's way. In fact, the col-
ony must have its lands and its water. It is only a
question of a very little time, the driving out of these
Saboba families as the Temeculas and San Pasquales
were driven, — by force, just as truly as if at the
point of the bayonet.

In one of the beautiful cafions opening on this
valley is the home of Victoriano, an aged chief of the
band. He is living with his daughter and grand-
children, in a comfortable adobe bouse at the head of
the caflon. The vineyard and peach orchard which
his father planted there, are in good bearing. His
grandson Jesus, a young man twenty years old, in

Condition of Mission Indians 141

the summer of 1881 ploughed up and planted twenty
acres of wheat. The boy also studied so faithfully
in school that year — his first year at school — that
he learned to read well in the " Fourth Reader ; " this
in spite of his being absent six weeks, in both spring
and autumn, with the sheep-shearing band. A letter
of his, written, at my request, to the Secretary of the
Interior in behalf of his people, is touching in its
simple dignity.

San Jacinto, May 29, 1882.
Mr. Teller.

Dear Sir, — At the request of my friends, I write
you in regard to the land of my people.

More than one hundred years ago my great-grand-
father, who was chief of his tribe, settled with his people
in the San Jacinto valley. The people have always
been peaceful, never caring for war, and have welcomed
Americans into the valley.

Some years ago a grant of land was given to the Estu-
dillos by the Mexican Government. The first survey
did not take in any of the land claimed by the Indians ;
but four years ago a new survey was made, taking in all
the little farms, the stream of water, and the village.
Upon this survey the United States Government gave a
patent. It seems hard for us to be driven from our
homes that we love as much as other people do theirs ;
and this danger is at our doors now, for the grant is
being divided and the village and land will be assigned
to some of the present owners of the grant.

And now, dear sir, after this statement of facts, I, for
my people (I ask nothing for myself), appeal to you for
help.

142 Glimpses of California

Cannot jou find some way to right this great wroug
done to a quiet and induatriouH people ?

Hoping that we may have justice done us, I am
Eespectfully youra,

Josi Jesdh Castiilo.

He wag at fifst unwilling to write it, fearing he
should be supposed to be begging for himself rather
than for his people. His father was a Mexican ; and
he has hoped that on that account their family would
be exempt from the fate of the village when the col-
ony comes into the valley. But it is not probable
that in a country where water is gold, a stream of
water such as runs by Victoiiano's door will be left
long in the possession of any Indian family, whatever
may be its relations to rich Mexican proprietors in
the neighborhood. Jesus'a mother ia a tall, superbly
formed woman, with a clear skin, hazel nut-brown
eyes that thrill one with their limpid brightness, a
nose straight and strong, and a mouth like an
Egyptian priestess. She ia past forty, but she is
strikingly handsome still ; and one does not wonder
at hearing the tragedy of her early youth, when, for
years, she believed heraelf the wife of Jeaus'a father,
lived in his house as a wife, worked as a wife, and
bore him his children. Her heart broke when she
was sent adrift, a sadder than Hagar, with her half-
disowned offapiing. Money and lands did not heal
the wound. Her face is dark with tlie sting of it to-
day. When I asked her to sell me the lace-trimmed
pillow-case and sheet from her bed, her cheeks flushed

.^_^

Condition of Mission Indians 145

at first, and she looked away haughtily before reply-
ing. But, after a moment, she consented. They
needed the money. She knows well that days of
trouble are in store for them.

Since the writing of this paper news has come that
the long-expected blow has fallen on this Indian
village. The colony scheme has been completed;
the valley has been divided up ; the land on which
the village of Saboba stands is now the property of a
San Bernardino merchant. Any day he chooses, he
can eject these Indians as the Temecula and the San
Pasqual bands .were ejected, and with far more show
of legal right.

In the vicinity of the San Juan Capistrano Mission
are living a few families of Indians, some of them the
former neophytes of the mission. An old woman
there, named Carmen, is a splendid specimen of the
best longevity which her race and the California air
can produce. We found her in bed, where she spends
most of her time, — not lying, but sitting cross-legged,
looking brisk and energetic, and always busy making
lace. Nobody makes finer lace than hers. Yet she
laughed when we asked if she could see to do such
fine work without spectacles.

^' Where could I get spectacles?" she said, her eyes

twinkling. Then she stretched out her hand for the

spectacles of our old Mexican friend who had asked

her this question for us ; took them, turned them

over curiously, tried to look through them, shook her

head, and handed them back to him with a shrug and

146 Glimpses of California

a smile. She wiis twenty years older than he; but
her strong, yonng eyes could not see through his
glasses. He recollected her well, fifty years before,
an active, handsome woman, taking care of the sac-
risty, washing the priests' laces, mending vestments,
and filling various offices of trust in the mission. A
sailor from a French vessel lying in the harbor wished
to marry her; but the friars would not give their
consent, because the man was a drunkard and dis-
honest. Cannen was well disposed to him, and much
flattered by his love-making. He used to write
letters to her, which she brought to this Mexican boy
to read. It was a droll sight to see her face, as he,
now white-haired and looking fully as old as she, re-
minded her of that time and of those letters, tapping
her jocosely on her cheek, and saying some things I
am sure he did not quite literally translate to us.
She fairly colored, buried her face in her hands for a
second, then laughed till she shook, and answered in
voluble Spanish, of which also I suspect we did not
get a full translation. She was the happiest Indian
we saw ; indeed, the only one who seemed really gay
of heart or even content.

A few rods from the old mission church of San
Gabriel, in a hut made of bundles of the tule reeds
lashed to sycamore poles, as the San Gabriel Indians
made them a hundred years ago, live two old Indian
women, Laura and Benjamina. Laura is one hundred
and two years old, Benjamina one hundred and seven-
teen. The record of their baptisms is still to be seen

Condition of Mission Indians 147

in the church books, so there can be no dispute as to
their age. It seems not at all incredible, however.
If I had been told that Benjamina was a three-thou-
sand-year-old Nile mummy, resuscitated by some
mysterious process, I should not have demurred much
at the tale. The first time I saw them, the two were
crouching over a fire on the ground, under a sort of
booth porch, in front of their hovel. Laura was mak-
ing a feint of grinding acorn-meal in a stone bowl ;
Benjamina was raking the ashes, with her claw-like
old fingers, for hot coals to start the fire afresh ; her
skin was like an elephant's, shrivelled, black, hang-
ing in folds and welts on her neck and breast and
bony arms; it was not like anything human; her
shrunken eyes, bright as beads, peered out from under
thickets of coarse grizzled gray hair. Laura wore a
white cloth band around her head, tied on Avith a strip
of scarlet flannel ; above that, a tattered black shawl,
which gave her the look of an aged imp.. Old bas-
kets, old pots, old pans, old stone mortars and pestles,
broken tiles and bricks, rags, straw, boxes, legless
chairs, — in short, all conceivable rubbish, — were
strewn about or piled up in the place, making the
weirdest of backgrounds for the aged crones' figures.
Inside the hut were two bedsteads and a few boxes,
baskets, and nets ; and drying grapes and peppers
hung on the walls. A few feet away was another
hut, only a trifle better than this ; four generations
were living in the two. Benjamina's step-daughter,
aged eighty, was a fine creature. With a white band

148 Glimpses of California

sti-aight around her forehead close to the eyebrows
and a gay jdaid handkerchief thrown on above it,
falling squarely each side of her face, she looked like
an old Bedouin sheik.

Our Mexican friend remembered Laura as she was
fifty years ago. She was then, even at fifty-two, cel-
ebrated as one of the swiftest runners and best ball-
players in all the San Gabriel games. She was a
singer, too, in the choir. Coaxing her up on her feet,
patting her shoulders, entreating and caressing her as
one would a child, he succeeded in persuading her to
chant for us the Lord's Prayer and part of the lit-
anies, as she had been wont to do it in the old days.
It was a grotesque and incredible sight. The more
she stirred and sang and lifted her arms, the less
alive she looked. We asked the step-daughter if they
were happy and wished to live. Laughing, she re-
peated llie question to them. '' Oh, yes, we wish to
live forever," they replied. They were greatly terri-
fied, the daughter said, when the railway cai-s first
ran through San Gabriel. They thought it was the
devil bringing fire to burn up the world. Their
chief solace is tobacco. To beg it, Benjamina will
creep about in the village by the hour, bent double
over her staff, tottering at every step. They sit for
the most part silent, motionless, on the ground ;
their knees drawn up, their hands clasped over them,
their heads sunk on their breasts. In my drives in
the San Gabriel valley I often saw them sitting thus,
as if they were dead. The sight had an indescrib-

^^H Condition

of Mission Indians 149 ^|

^^B able fascination.

[t seemeil m to [)(>ti- ^^^|

^^^1 etrate into tho

^^^^^1

^^H recesses of tlu'ir

^^H

^^H thoughts wonliL
^H be to lay lioM
^^H upon secrets a:^
^^H old as the earth.

^H One the

A^ j^^^jjSjfeit^^

^^H most beautiful

^^^^1

^^H appanages of iho
^^H San Luis R<.'y

'■v V^^H^I^H^HSd

^^H Mission, in the

tt 'i^w^^^^^^^^Hj

^^1

^^H time of its pros-

^^H perity, was the
^H Pala valley. It
^^^H lies about twenty-
^H five miles east of

^ V T^

^H San Luis, among
^^^B broken spurs of
^^K the Coast Range,
^^H watered by the

m^^mk': s ■ >v ■ ■■

^^1 San Luis River,

^^H and also by its

^^^^H

^^^B own little stream.

l^^^^^l

^H the Pala Creek.

I^^^^^H

^H It was always a
^^H| favorite home of

^K the Indians ; and

^^H at the time of the

^^H secularization.

Ikvt-c»tt. Ri«.:«. Mission ^M

150 Glimpses of California

over a thousand of them used to gather at the
weekly mass in its chapel. Now, on the occasional
visits of the San Juan Capistrano priest, to hold
service there, the dilapidated little church is not
half filled, and the numbers are growing smaller
each year. The buildings are all in decay; the
stone steps leading to the belfry have crumbled;
the walls of the little graveyard are broken in many
places, the paling and the graves are thrown down.
On the day we were there, a memorial service for
the dead was going on in the chapel ; a great square
altar was draped with black, decorated with silver
lace and ghastly funereal emblems; candles were
burning; a row of kneeling black-shawled women
were holding lighted candles in their hands; two
old Indians were chanting a Latin Mass from a
tattered missal bound in rawhide; the whole place
was full of chilly gloom, in sharp contrast to the
bright valley outside, with its sunlight and silence.
This mass was for the soul of an old Indian woman
named Margarita, sister of Manuelito, a somewhat
famous chief of several bands of the San Luisefios.
Her home was at the Potrero, — a mountain meadow,
or pasture, as the word signifies, — about ten miles
from Pala, high up the mountain-side, and reached
by an almost impassable road. This farm — or
"saeter " it would be called in Norway — was given
to Margarita by the friars ; and by some exceptional
good fortune she had a title which, it is said, can be
maintained by her heirs. In 1871, in a revolt of

Condition of Mission Indians 1 5 1

some of Manuelito's bands, Margarita was hung up
by her wrists till she was near dying, but was cut
down at the last minute and saved.

One of her daughters speaks a little English ; and
finding that we had visited Pala solely on account of
our interest in the Indians, she asked us to come up
to the Potrero and pass the night. She said timidly
that they had plenty of beds, and would do all that
they knew how to do to make us comfortable. One
might be in many a dear-priced hotel less comfort-
ably lodged and served than we were by these hospi-
table Indians in their mud house, floored with earth.
In my bedroom were three beds, all neatly made,
with lace-trimmed sheets and pillow-cases and patch-
work coverlids. One small square window with a
wooden shutter was the only aperture for air, and
there was no furniture except one chair and a half-
dozen trunks. The Indians, like the Norwegian
peasants, keep their clothes and various properties
all neatly packed away in boxes or trunks. As I fell
asleep, I wondered if in the morning I should see
Indian heads on the pillows opposite me ; the whole
place was swarming with men, women, and babies,
and it seemed impossible for them to spare so many
beds ; but, no, when I waked, there were the beds
still undisturbed ; a soft-eyed Indian girl was on her
knees rummaging in one of the trunks ; seeing me
awake, she murmured a few words in Indian, which
conveyed her apology as well as if I had understood
them. From the very bottom of the trunk she drew

152 Glimpses of California

out a gilt-edged china mug, darted out of the room,
and came back bringing it filled with fresh water.
As she set it in the chair, in which she had already
put a tin pan of water and a clean coarse towel, she
smiled, and made a sign that it was for my teeth.
There was a thoughtf ulness and delicacy in the atten-
tion which lifted it far beyond the level of its literal
value. The gilt-edged mug was her most precious
possession ; and, in remembering water for the teeth,
she had provided me with the last superfluity in the
way of white man's comfort of which she could
think.

The food which they gave us was a surprise ; it
was far better than we had found the night before in
the house of an Austrian colonel's son, at Pala.
Chicken, deliciously cooked, with rice and chile ;
soda-biscuits delicately made ; good milk and butter,
all laid in orderly fashion, with a clean table-cloth,
and clean, white stone china. When I said to our
hostess that I regretted very much that they had
given up their beds in my room, that they ought not
to have done it, she answered me with a wave of her
hand that " it was nothing ; they hoped I had slept
well ; that they had plenty of other beds." The hos-
pitable lie did not deceive me, for by examination I
had convinced myself that the greater part of the
family must have slept on the bare earth in the
kitchen. They would not have taken pay for our
lodging, except that they had just been forced to
give so much for the mass for Margarita's soul, and

Condition of Mission Indians 153

it had been hard for them to raise the money.
Twelve dollars the priest had charged for the mass ;
and in addition they had to pay for the candles, sil-
ver lace, black cloth, etc., nearly as much more.
They had earnestly desired to have the mass said at
the Potrero, but the priest would not come up there
for less than twenty dollars, and that, Antonia said,
with a sigh, they could not possibly pay. We left
at six o'clock in the morning ; Margarita's husband,
the *' capitan," riding off with us to see us safe on
our way. When we had passed the worst gullies
and boulders, he whirled his horse, lifted his ragged
old sombrero with the grace of a cavalier, smiled,
wished us good-day and good luck, and was out
of sight in a second, his little wild pony galloping
up the rough trail as if it were as smooth as a
race-course.

Between the Potrero and Pala are two Indian vil-
lages, the Rincon and Pauma. The Rincon is at the
head of the valley, snugged up against the moun-
tains, as its name signifies, in a "comer." Here
were fences, irrigating ditches, fields of barley,
wheat, hay, and peas ; a little herd of horses and
cows grazing, and several flocks of sheep. The men
were all away sheep-shearing; the women were at
work in the fields, some hoeing, some clearing out
the irrigating ditches, and all the old women plaiting
baskets. These Rincon Indians, we were told, had
refused a school offered them by the Government;
they said they would accept nothing at the hands of

154 Glimpses of California

the Government until it gave them a title to their
lands.

The most picturesque of all the Mission Indians'
hiding-places which we saw was that on the Carmel
River, a few miles from the San Carlos Mission.
Except by help of a guide it cannot be found. A
faint trail turning off from the road in the river-
bottom leads down to the river's edge. You follow
it into the river and across, supposing it a ford. On
the opposite bank there is no trail, no sign of one.
Whether it is that the Indians purposely always go
ashore at different points of the bank, so as to leave
no trail ; or whether they so seldom go out, except on
foot, that the trail has faded away, I do not know.
But certainly, if we had had no guide, we should
have turned back, sure we were wrong. A few rods
up from the river-bank, a stealthy narrow footpath
appeared; through willow copses, sunk in meadow
grasses, across shingly bits of alder-walled beach it
creeps, till it comes out in a lovely spot, — half basin,
half rocky knoll, — where, tucked away in nooks
and hollows, are the little Indian houses, eight or ten
of them, some of adobe, some of the tule-reeds ; small
patches of corn, barley, potatoes, and hay ; and each
little front yard fenced in by palings, with roses,
sweet-peas, poppies, and mignonette growing inside.
In the first house we reached, a woman was living
alone. She was so alarmed at the sight of us that
she shook. There could not be a more pitiful com-
ment on the state of perpetual distrust and alarm in

Condition of Mission Indians 157

which the poor creatures live, than this woman's face
and behavior. We tried in vain to reassure her ; we
bought all the lace she had to sell, chatted with her
about it, and asked her to show us how it was made.
Even then she was so terrified that although she will-
ingly took down her lace-frame to sew a few stitches
for us to see, her hands still trembled. In another
house we found an old woman evidently past eighty,
without glasses working button-holes in fine thread.
Her daughter-in-law — a beautiful half-breed, with a
still more beautiful baby in her arms — asked the old
woman, for us, how old she was. She laughed mer-
rily at the silly question, " She never thought about
it," she said; "it was written down once in a book
at the Mission, but the book was lost."

There was not a man in the village. They were
all away at work, farming or fishing. This little
handful of people are living on land to which they
have no shadow of title, and from which they may be
driven any day, — these Carmel Mission lands having
been rented out, by their present owner, in great daiiy
farms. The parish priest of Monterey told me much
of the pitiable condition of these remnants of the San
Carlos Indians. He can do little or nothing for them,
though their condition makes his heart ache daily.
In that half-foreign English which is always so much
more eloquent a language than the English-speaking
peoples use, he said: *' They have their homes there
only by the patience of the thief ; it may be that the
patience do not last to-morrow." The phrase is worth

158 Glimpses of California

preserving; it embodies so much history, — history of
two races.

In Mr. Wilson's report are many eloquent and
strong paragraphs, bearing on the question of the
Indians' right to the lands they had under cultivation
at the time of the secularization. He says : —

" It is not natural rights I speak of, nor merely pos-
sessory rights, but rights acquired and contracts made, —
acquired and made when the laws of the Indies had force
here, and never assailed by any laws or executive acts
since, till 1834 and 1846 ; and impregnable to these. . . .
No past maladministration of laws can be suffered to
destroy their true intent, while the victims of the mal-
administration live to complain, and the rewards of wrong
have not been consumed."

Of Mr. Wilson's report in 1852, of Mr. Ames's
repoi-t in 1873, and of the various other reports called
for by the Government from time to time, nothing
came, except the occasional setting off of reservations
by executive orders, which, if the lands reserved were
worth anything, w^ere speedily revoked at the bidding
of California politicians. There are still some reser-
vations left, chiefly of desert and mountainous lands,
which nobody wants, and on which the Indians could
not live.

The last report made to the Indian Bureau by their
present agent closes in the following words : —

*' The necessity of providing suitable lands for them
in the forra of one or more reservations has been pressed
on the attention of the Department in my former reports;

Condition of Mission Indians 159

and I now, for the third and perhaps the last time,
emphasize that necessity by saying that whether Govern-
ment will immediately heed the pleas that have been
made in behalf of these people or not it must sooner or
later deal with this question in a practical way, or else
see a population of over tliree thousand Indians become
homeless wanderers in a desert region."

I have shown a few glimpses of the homes, of the
industry, the patience, the long-suffering of the people
who are in this immediate danger of being driven out
from their last footholds of refuge, *' homeless wan-
derers in a desert."

If the United States Government does not take
steps to avert this danger, to give them lands and
protect them in their rights, the chapter of the history
of the Mission Indians will be the blackest one in the
black record of our dealings with the Indian race.

It must be done speedily if at all, for there is only
a small remnant left to be saved. These are in their
present homes "only by the patience of the thief;
it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow."

ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS

The tale of the founding of the city of Los Angeles
is a tale for verse rather than for prose. It reads like
a page out of some new " Earthly Paradise," and
would fit well into song such as William Morris has
sung.

It is only a hundred years old, however, and that
is not time enough for such song to simmer. It will
come later, with the perfume of century-long summers
added to its flavor. Summers century-long? One
might say a stronger thing than that of them, seeing
that their blossoming never stops, year in nor year
out, and will endure as long as the visible frame of
the earth.

The twelve devout Spanish soldiers who founded
the city named it at their leisure with a long name,
musical as a chime of bells. It answered well enough,
no doubt, for the first fifty years of the city's life,
during which not a municipal record of any sort or
kind was written, — "Nuestra Seflora Reina de los
Angeles," " Our Lady the Queen of the Angels ; "
and her portrait made a goodly companion flag,
unfurled always by the side of the flag of Spain.

164 Glimpses of California

There is a legend, that sounds older than it is, of
the ceremonies with which the soldiers took posBession
of their new home. They were no longer young.
They had fought for Spain in many parts of the Old
World, and followed her uneertiin fortunes to the
New. Ten years some of them had been faithfully
servuig Church and king in sight of these fair lands,
for which they hankered, and with reason.

In those days the soft, rolling, ti'eeless hills and
valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now
takes its shilly-shallying course seaward, were forest
slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small.
This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing
among them, added to the limitless bloom of the
plains and the splendor of the snow-topped moun-
tains, must have made the whole region indeed a
paradise.

Navan-o, Villavicencia, Rodriguez, Quintero, Mo-
reno, Lani, Banegas, Rosas, and Canero, these were
their names : happy soldiers all, honored of their
king, and discharged with so royal a gift of lands
thus fair.

Looking out across the Los Angeles hills and
meadows to-day, one easily lives over again the joy
they must have felt. Twenty-three young children
there were in the band, poor little waifs of camp and
march. What a " braw flitting " was it for them,
away from the drum-beat forever into the shelter of
their own sunny home 1 The legend says not a word
of the mothers, except that there were eleven of them,

Echoes in the City of the Angels 165

and in the procession they walked with their chil-
dren behind the men. Doubtless they rejoiced the
most.

The Fathers from the San Gabriel Mission were
there, with many Indian neophytes, and Don Felipe,
the military governor, with his showy guard of
soldiers.

The priests and neophytes chanted. The Cross
was set up, the flag of Spain and the banner of Our
Lady the Queen of the Angels unfurled, and the new
town marked out around a square, a little to the
north of the present plaza of Los Angeles.

If communities, as well as individuals, are happy
V when history finds nothing to record of them, the city
of the Queen of the Angels must have been a happy
spot during the first fifty years of its life ; for not a
written record of the period remains, not even
a record of grants of land. The kind of grant
that these worthy Spanish soldiers and their sons
contented themselves with, however, hardly deserved
recording, — in fact, was not a grant at all, since its
continuance depended entirely on the care a man
took of his house and the improvement he put on
his land. If he left his house unoccupied or let
it fall out of repair, if he left a field uncultivated
for two yeara, any neighbor who saw fit might de-
nounce him, and by so doing acquire a right to
the property. This sounds incredible, but all the
historical accounts of the time agree on the point
They say: —

1 66 Glimpses of California

**The granting authorities could, and were by law
required, upon a proper showing of the abandonment, to
grant the property to the informant, who then acquired
the same and no better rights than those possessed by
his predecessor/'

This was a premium indeed on staying at home
and minding one's business, — a premium which
amounted to coercion. One would think that there
must have been left from those days teeming recoi-ds
of alienated estates, shifted tenures, and angry feuds
between neighbor and neighbor. But no evidence
remains of such strifes. Life was too simple, and
the people were too ignorant.

Their houses were little more than hovels, built of
mud, eight feet high, with flat roofs made of reeds
and asphaltum. Their fields, with slight cultivation,
produced all they needed; and if anything lacked,
the rich vineyards, wheat-fields, and orchards of the
San Gabriel Mission lay only twelve miles away.
These vineyards, orchards, and granaries, so near at
hand, must have been sore temptation to idleness.
Each head of a family had been presented, by the
paternal Spanish king, with " two oxen, two mules,
two mares, two sheep, two goats, two cows, one calf,
an ass, and one hoe." For these they were to pay in
such small instalments as they were able to spare out
of their pay and rations, which were still continued
by the generous king.

In a climate in which flowers blossom winter and
summer alike, man may bask in sun all the year

Echoes in the City of the Angels 167

round if he chooBes. Why, then, should those happy
Spanish soldiers work ? Even the king had thought
it unnecessary, it seems, to give them any implements
of labor except " one hoe." What could a family do,
in the way of work, with " one hoe " ? Evidently they
did not work, — neither they, nor their sons, nor their
sons' sons after them ; for, half a century later, they
were still living a life of almost incredible ignoi-ance,
redeemed only by its simplicity and childlike adher^
ence to the old religious observances.

Many of those were beautiful. As late as 1830 it
was the custom throughout the town, in all the
families of the early settlei'S, for the oldest member
of the family — of tenest it was a grandfather or
grandmother — to rise every morning at the rising
of the morning star, and at once to strike up a hymn.
At the first note every person in the house would
rise, or sit up in bed and join in the song. From
house to house, street to street, the singing spread;
and the volume of musical sound swelled, until it
was as if the whole town sang.

The hymns were usually invocations to the Virgin,
to Jesus, or to some saint. The opening line of
many of them was, —

" Rejoioe, O Mother of God."

A manuscript copy of one of these old morning
songs I have seen, and had the good fortune to win
a literal translation of part of it, in the soft, Spanish-
Toiced, broken English, so pleasant to hear. The

1 68; Glimpses of California

first stanza is the chorus, and was repeated after
each of the' others -^:.

** Come, O sinners,

Come, and we will sing
Tender hymns
To our refuge.

<' Singers at dawn,

From the heavens above,
People all regions ;
Gladly we too sing.

" Singing harmoniously,

Saying to Mary,
* O beautiful Queen,
Princess of Heaven 1

" * Your beautiful head
Crowned we see ;
The stars are adorning
Your beautiful hair ;

" * Your eyebrows are arched,
Your forehead serene ;
Your face turned always
Looks toward God ;

** * Your eyes' radiance
Is like beautiful stars ;
Like a white dove,
You are true to your spouse.' "

Each of these stanzas was sung first alone by
the aged leader of the family choir. Then the rest
repeated it; then all joined in the chorus.

It is said that there are still to be found, in lonely
country regions in California, Mexican homes in

Echoes in the City of the Angels 169

which these sweet and holy "songs before sunrise "
are sung.

Looking forward to death, the greatest anxiety of
these simple souls was to provide themselves with a
priest's cast-off robe to be buried in. These were
begged or bought as the greatest of treasures ; kept
in sight, or always at hand, to remind them of ap-
proaching death. When their last hour drew near,
this robe was flung over their breasts, and they died
happy, their stiffening fingers grasping its folds.
The dead body was wrapped in it, and laid on the
mud floor of the house, a stone being placed under
the head to raise it a few inches. Thus the body
must lie till the time of burial. Around it, day and
night, squatted, praying and singing, friends who
wished not only to show their affection for the de-
ceased, but to win indulgences for themselves ; every
prayer said thus, by the side of a corpse, having a
special and specified value.

A strange demarkation between the sexes was
enforced in these ceremonies. If it were a woman
who lay dead, only women might kneel and pray and
watch with her body ; if a man, the circle of watchers
must be exclusively of men.

A rough box, of boards nailed together, was the
coffin. The body, rolled in the old robe whose
virtues had so comforted its last conscious moments,
was carried to the grave on a board, in the centre of
a procession of friends chanting and singing. Not
until the last moment was it laid in the box.

17° Glimpses of California

The first attempts to introduce more civilized forms
of burial met with opposition, aad it was only by
slow degrees that changes were wrought. A French-
man, who had come from France to Loa Angeles, by
way of the Sandwich Islands, bringing a store of
Bacred ornaments and trinkets, and had grown rich
by sale of thera to the devout, owned a spring wagon,
the only one in the country. By dint of entreatj',
the people were finally prevailed upon to allow their
dead to be carried in this wagon to the burial-place.
For a long time, however, they refused to have horses
put to the wagon, but drew it by hand all the way ;
women drawing women, and men drawing men, with
the same scrupulous partition of the sexes as in the
earlier ceremoniea. The picture must have been a
strange one, and not without pathos, — the wagon,
wound and draped with black and white, drawn up
and down the steep hills by the band of silent
mourners.

The next innovation was the introduction of stately
catafalques for the dead to repose on, either in house
or church, during the interval between their death
and burial. There had been brought into the town a
few old-fashioned, high-post, canopied bedsteads, and
from these the first catafalques were made. Gilded,
decorated with gold and silver lace, and hung wdth
white and black draperies, they made a by no means
insignificant show, which doubtless went far to recon-
cile people's minds to the new methods,

In 1838 there was a memorable funeral of a woman

Echoes in the City of the Angels 173

over a hundred years old. Fourteen old women
watched with her body, which lay stretched on the
floor, in the ancient fashion, with only a stone be-
neath the head. The youngest of these watchers
was eighty-five. One of them, Tomasa Camera by
name, was herself over a hundred years old. Tomasa
was infirm of foot ; so they propped her with pillows in
a little cart, and drew her to the house that ffhe might
not miss of the occasion. All night long, the four-
teen squatted or sat on rawhides spread on the floor,
and sang and prayed and smoked: as fine a wake
as was ever seen. They smoked cigarettes, which
they rolled on the spot, out of corn-husks slit fine for
the purpose, their being at that day in Los Angeles
no paper fit for cigarettes.

Outside this body-guard of aged women knelt a
circle of friends and relatives, also chanting, praying,
and smoking. In this outer circle any one might
come and go at pleasure ; but into the inner ring of
the watching none must come, and none must go out
of it till the night was spent.

With the beginning of the prosperity of the City
of the Angels, came the end of its primeval peace.
Spanish viceroys, Mexican alcaldes and governors,
United States commanders, naval and military, fol-
lowed on each other's heels, with or without frays,
ruling California through a succession of tumultuous
years. Greedy traders from all parts of the world
added their rivalries and interventions to the civil
and military disputation. In the general anarchy

174 Glimpses of California

and confusion, the peaceful and peace-loving Catholic
Fathers were robbed of their lands, their converts
were scattered, their industries broken up. Nowhere
were these uncomfortable years more uncomfortable
than in Los Angeles. Revolts, occupations, surren-
ders, retakings, and resurrenders kept the little town
in perpetual ferment. Disorders were the order of
the day and of the night, in small matters as well as
in great

The Califomian fought as impetuously for his old
way of dancing as for his political allegiance. There
are comical traditions of the men's determination never
to wear long trousers to dances ; nor to permit dances
to be held in houses or halls, it having been the prac-
tice always to give them in outdoor booths or bowers,
witli lattice-work walls of sycamore poles lashed to-
gether by thongs of rawhide.

Outside these booths the men sat on their horses
looking in at the dancing, which was chiefly done by
the women. An old man standing in the centre of
the enclosure directed the dances. Stopping in front
of the girl whom he wished to have join the set, he
clapped his hands. She then rose and took her place
on the floor ; if she could not dance, or wished to
decline, she made a low bow and resumed her seat.

To look in on all this was great sport. Sometimes,
unable to resist the spell, a man would fling himself
off his horse, dash into the enclosure, seize a gir] by
the waist, whirl around with her through one dance,
then out again and into the saddle, where he sat,

Echoes in the City of the Angels 175

proudly aware of his vantage. The decorations of
masculine attire at this time were such as to make
riding a fine show. Around the crown of the broad-
brimmed sombrero was twisted a coil of gold or silver
cord ; over the shoulders was flung, with ostentatious
carelessness, a short cloak of velvet or brocade ; the
waistcoata were embroidered in gold, silver, or gay
colors J ao also were the kuee- breeches, leggings, and
stockings. Long silken garters, with ornamented
tassels at the ends, were wound round and roimd to
hold the stockings in place. Even the cumbrous
wooden stirrups were carved in elaborate designs.
No wonder that men accustomed to such braveries as
these saw ignominy in the plain American trousers.

They seem to have been a variety of Centaur, these
early Californian men. They were seldom off their
horses except to eat and sleep. They mounted, with
jingling silver spur and glittering bridle, for the
shortest distances, even to cross a plaza. They
paid long visits on horseback, without dismounting.
Clattering up to the window or door-sill, halting,
throwing one knee over the crupper, the reins lying
loose, they sat at ease, far more at ease than in a
house. Only at church, where the separation was
inevitable, would they be parted from their horses.
They turned the near neighborhood of a church on
Sunday into a sort of picket-ground, or horse-trainers'
yard, full of horae-poats and horses ; and the scene
was far more like a horse-fair than like an occasion
of holy obeervanoe. There seems to have been a

Echoes in the City of the Angels 177

the Church issued an edict against that '^ escandalo-
sisima" dance, the waltz, declaring that whoever
dared to dance it should be excommunicated, the
merry sinners waltzed on only the harder and faster,
and laughed in their priests' faces. And when the
advocates of decorum, good order, and indoor dancing
gave their first ball in a public hall in Los Angeles,
the same merry outdoor party broke every window
and door in the building, and put a stop to the fes-
tivity. They persisted in taking this same summary
vengeance on occasion after occasion, until, finally,
any person wishing to give a ball in his own house
was forced to surround the house by a cordon of police
to protect it.

The City of the Angels is a prosperous city now. It
has business thoroughfares, blocks of fine stone build-
ings, hotels, shops, banks, and is growing daily. Its
outlying regions are a great circuit of gardens,
orchards, vineyards, and corn-fields, and its suburbs
are fast filling up with houses of a showy though
cheap architecture. But it has not yet shaken o£f its
past. A certain indefinable, delicious aroma from the
old, ignorant, picturesque times lingers still, not only
in byways and comers, but in the very centres of its
newest activities.

Mexican women, their heads wrapped in black

shawls, and their bright eyes peering out between the

close-gathered folds, glide about everywhere; the

soft Spanish speech is continually heard ; long-robed

priests hurry to and fro ; and at each dawn ancient,

»78 Glimpses of California

jangling bells from tlie Church of the Lady of the
Angels ring out the night and in the day. Venders
of strange commoditiea drive in stranger vehicles up
and down the streets ; antiquated carts piled high with
oranges, their golden opulence conti'asting weirdly
with the shabbiness of their surroundings and the
evident poverty of their owner; close following on
the gold of one of these, one has sometimes the luck
to see another cart, still more antiquated and rickety,
piled high with something — he cannot imagine
what — tenu-cotta red in gi'otesque shapes ; it is
fuel, — the same sort which Villa vie encia, Quintero,
and the rest probably burned, when they burned any,
a hundred years ago. It is the roots and root-shoots
of nianzanita and other shrubs. The colors are
superb, — terra-cotta reds, shading up to flesh pink,
and down to dark mahogany; but the foiTas are
grotesque beyond comparison : twists, queris, con-
tortions, a boxful of them is an uncomfortable presence
in one's room, and putting them on the fire is like
cremating the vertebra and double teeth of colossal
monsters of the Pterodactyl period.

The present plaza of the city is near the original
plaza marked out at the time of the first settlement ;
the low adobe house of one of the early governors
stands yet on it^ east side, and is still a habitable
building.

The plaza is a dusty and dismal little place, with a
parsimonious fountain in the centre, surrounded by
spokes of thin turf, and walled at its outer circum-

Echoes in the City of the Angels 1 79

ference by a row of tall Monterey cypresses, shorn
and clipped into the shape of huge croquettes or brad-
awls standing broad end down. At all hours of the day
idle boys and still idler men are to be seen basking
on the fountain's stone rim, or lying, face down, heels
in air, in the triangles of shade made by the cypress
croquettes. There is in Los Angeles much of this
ancient and ingenious style of shearing and compress-
ing foliage into unnatural and distorted shapes. It
comes, no doubt, of lingering reverence for the tradi-
tions of what was thought beautiful in Spain centuries
ago ; and it gives to the town a certain quaint and
foreign look, in admirable keeping with its irregular
levels, zigzag, toppling precipices, and houses in tiers
one above another.

One comes sometimes abruptly on a picture which
seems bewilderingly un-American, of a precipice wall
covered with bird-cage cottages, the little, paling-
walled yard of one jutting out in a line with the
chimney-tops of the next one below, and so on down
to the street at the base of the hill. Wooden stair-
cases and bits of terrace link and loop the odd little
perches together ; bright green pepper-trees, sometimes
tall enough to shade two or three tiers of roofs, give
a graceful plumed draping at the sides, and some of
the steep fronts are covered with bloom, in solid cur-
tains, of geranium, sweet alyssum, heliotrope, and
ivy. These terraced eyries are not the homes of the
rich : the houses are lilliputian in size, and of cheap
quality; but they do more for the picturesqueness

i8o Glimpses of California

of the city than all the large, fine, and costly houses
put together.

Moreover, they are the only houses that command
the situation, possess distance and a hoj'izon. From
some oE these littlu ten-hy-twelve flower-beds of homes
is a strett'h of view which makes each hour of the day
a succession of changing splendors, — tiie snowy peaks
of San Bernardino and San Jacinto in the east and
south ; to the west, vast open country, billowy green
with vineyard and orchard; beyond tliis, in clear
weather, shining glints and threads of ocean, and
again beyond, in the farthest outing, hill-orowned
islands, misty blue against the sky. No one knows
Los Angeles who does not climb to these sunny out-
lying heights, and roam and linger on them many a
day. Nor, even thus lingering, will any one ever
know more of Los Angeles than its lovely outward
semblances and mysterious suggestions, unless he
have the good fortune to win past the barrier of proud,
sensitive, tender reserve, behind which is Lid the life
of the few remaining sui-vivors of tlje old Spanish
and Mexican Hgime.

Once past this, he gets glimpses of the same stint-
less hospitality and iniraeasurahle courtesy which gave
to the old Franciscan establishmeiita a world-wide
fame, and to the society whose tone and customs they
created an atmosphere of simple-hearted joyonaness
and generosity never known by any other communi-
ties on the American continent.

In houses whose doors seldom open to English-

Echoes in the City of the Angels i8i

speaking people, there are rooms full of relics of that
fast-vanishing past, — strongholds also of a religious
faith, almost as obsolete, in its sort and degree, as are
the garments of the aged creatures who are peacefully
resting their last days on its support.

In one of these houses, in a poverty-stricken but
gayly decorated little bedroom, hangs a small oil-
painting, a portrait of Saint Francis de Paula. It
was brought from Mexico, fifty-five years ago, by the
woman who still owns it, and has knelt before it and
prayed to it every day of the fifty-five years. Below it
is a small altar covered with flowers, candlesticks,
vases, and innumerable knick-knacks. A long string
under the picture is hung full of tiny gold and silver vo-
tive offerings from persons who have been miraculously
cured in answer to prayers made to the saint. Legs,
arms, hands, eyes, hearts, heads, babies, dogs, horses,
— no organ, no creature, that could suffer, is unrep-
resented. The old woman has at her tongue's end
the tale of each one of these miracles. She is herself
a sad cripple ; her feet swollen by inflammation, which
for many years has given her incessant torture and
made it impossible for her to walk, except with totter-
ing steps, from room to room, by help of a staff.
This, she says, is the only thing her saint has not
cured. It is her " cross," her " mortification of the
flesh," " to take her to heaven." " He knows best."
As she speaks, her eyes peipetually seek the picture,
resting on it with a look of ineffable adoration. She
has seen tears roll down its cheeks more than oncey

1 82 Glimpses of California

she says; and it often smiles on her when they
are alone. When strangers enter the room, she can
always tell, by its expression, whether the saint is
or is not pleased with them, and whether their
prayers will be granted. She was good enough to
remark that he was very glad to see ns; she was
sure of it by the smile in his eye. He had wrought
many beautiful miracles for her. Nothing was too
trivial for his sympathy and help. Once when
she had broken a vase in which she had been in
the habit of keeping flowers on the altar, she took
the pieces in her hands, and standing before him,
said : " You know you will miss this vase. I always
put your flowers in it, and I am too poor to buy an-
other. Now, do mend this for me. I have nobody
but you to help me." And the vase grew together
again whole while she was speaking. In the same
way he mended for her a high glass flower-case which
stood on the altar.

Thus she jabbered away breathlessly in Spanish,
almost too fast to be followed. Sitting in a high
chair, her poor distorted feet propped on a cushion, a
black silk handkerchief wound like a turban around
her head, a plaid ribosa across her shoulders, contrast-
ing sharply with her shabby wine-colored gown, her
hands clasped around a yellow staff, on which she
leaned as she bent forward in her eager speaking, she
made a study for an artist.

She was very beautiful in her youth, she said ; her
cheeks so red that people thought they were painted.

Echoes in the City of the Angels 183

and she was so strong that she was never tired;
and when, in the first year of her widowhood, a stranger
came to her '' with a letter of recommendation " to be
her second husband, and before she had time to speak
had fallen on his knees at her feet, she seized him by
the throat, and toppling him backward, pinned him
against the wall till he was black in the face. And
her sister came running up in terror, imploring her
not to kill him. But all that strength is gone now,
she says sadly ; her memory also. Each day, as soon
as she has finished her prayers, she has to put away
her rosary in a special place, or else she forgets that
the prayers have been said. Many priests have de-
sired to possess her precious miracle-working saint ;
but never till she dies will it leave her bedroom.
Not a week passes without some one's arriving to im-
plore its aid. Sometimes the deeply distressed come
on their knees all the way from the gate before the
house, up the steps, through the hall, and into her
bedroom. Such occasions as these are to her full of
solemn joy, and no doubt, also, of a secret exultation
whose kinship to pride she does not suspect.

In another unpretending little adobe house, not
far from this Saint Francis shrine, lives the grand-
daughter of Moreno, one of the twelve Spanish sol-
diers who founded the city. She speaks no word of
English ; and her soft black eyes are timid, though
she is the widow of a general, and in the stormy days
of the City of the Angels passed through many a crisis
of peril and adventure. Her house is full of curious

184 Glimpses of California

relics, which she shows with a gentle, half-amused
courtesy. It is not easy for her to believe that any
American can feel real reverence for the symbols,
tokens, and relics of the life and customs which his
people destroyed. In her mind Americans remain
to-day as completely foreigners as they were when her
husband girded on his sword and went out to fight
them, forty years ago. Many of her relics have been
rescued at one time or another from plunderers of
the missions. She has an old bronze kettle which
once held holy water at San Fernando; an incense
cup and spoon, and massive silver candlesticks ; car-
tridge-boxes of leather, with Spain's ancient seal
stamped on them ; a huge copper caldron and scales
from San Gabriel ; a bunch of keys of hammered iron,
locks, scissora, reaping-hooks, shovels, carding-brushes
for wool and for flax : all made by the Indian workmen
in the missions. There Wiis also one old lock, in which
the key was rusted fast and immovable, which seemed
to me fuller of suggestion than anything else there
of the sealed and ended past to which it had belonged ;
and a curious little iron cannon, in shape like an ale-
mug, about eight inches high, with a hole in the side
and in the top, to be used by setting it on the groimd
and laying a trail of powder to the opening in the side.
This gave the Indians great delight. It was fired at
the times of church festivals, and in seasons of
drought to bring rain. Another curious instrument
of racket was the matrarca, a strip of board with two
small swinging iron handles so set in it that in swing*

Echoes in the City of the Angels 187

ing back and forth they hit iron plates. In the time
of Lent when all ringing of bells was forbidden, these
were rattled to call the Indians to church. The noise
one of them can make when vigorously shaken is aston-
ishing. In crumpled bundles, their stiffened meshes
opening out reluctantly, were two curious rush-woven
nets which had been used by Indian women fifty years
ago in carrying burdens. Similar nets, made of
twine, are used by them still. Fastened to a leather
strap or band passing around the forehead, they hang
down behind far below the waist, and when filled out
to their utmost holding capacity are so heavy that the
poor creatures bend nearly double beneath them.
But the women stand as uncomplainingly as camels
while weight after weight is piled in ; then slipping
the band over their heads, they adjust the huge bur-
den and set off at a trot. "This is the squaw's
horse," said an Indian woman in the San Jacinto valley
one day, tapping her forehead and laughing good-
naturedly, when the shopkeeper remonstrated with
her husband, who was heaping article after article,
and finally a large sack of flour, on her shoulders ;
" squaw's horse very strong."

The original site of the San Gabriel Mission was a
few miles to the east of the City of the Angels. Its
lands are now divided into ranches and colony settle-
ments, only a few acres remaining in the possession of
the Church. But the old chapel is still standing in
a fair state of preservation, used for the daily services
of the San Gabriel parish; and there are in its near

1 88 Glimpses of California

neighborhood a few crumbling adobe hovels left, the
only remains of the once splendid and opulent mis-
sion. In one of these lives a Mexican woman, eighty-
two years old, who for njiore than half a century has
washed and mended the priests' laces, repaired the
robes, and remodelled the vestments' of San Gabriel.
She is worth crossing the continent to see : all white
from head to foot, as if bleached by some strange
gramarye ; white hair, white skin, blue eyes faded
nearly to white ; white cotton clothes, ragged and not
over clean, yet not a trace of color in them ; a white
linen handkerchief, delicately embroidered by herself,
always tied loosely around her throat. She sits on a
low box, leaning against the wall, with three white
pillows at her back, her feet on a cushion on the
ground ; in front of her, another low box, on this a
lace-maker's pillow, with knotted fringe stretched on
it ; at her left hand a battered copper caldron, holding
hot coals to warm her fingers and to light her cigar-
ettes. A match she will never use ; and she has sel-
dom been without a cigarette in her mouth since she
was six years old. On her right hand is a chest filled
with her treasures, — rags of damask, silk, velvet,
lace, muslin, ribbon, artificial flowers, flosses, worsteds,
silks on spools ; here she sits, day in, day out, mak-
ing cotton fringes and, out of shreds of silk, tiny em-
broidered scapulars, which she sells to all devout and
charitable people of the region. She also teaches the
children of the parish to read and to pray. The walls
of her hovel are papered with tattered pictures, includ-

Echoes in the City of the Angels 189

ing many gay-colored ones, taken off tin cans, their
flaunting signs reading drolly, — "Perfection Press
Mackerel, Boston, Mass.," '' Charm Baking Powder,"
and " Knowlton's Inks," alternating with " Toledo
Blades " and clipper-ship advertisements. She finds
these of great use in both teaching and amusing the
children. The ceiling, of canvas, black with smoke
and festooned with cobwebs, sags down in folds, and
shows many a rent. When it rains, her poor little
place must be drenched in spots. One end of the
room is curtained off with calico; this is her bed-
chamber. At the other end is a raised dais, on which
stands an altar, holding a small statuette of the
Infant Jesus. It is a copy in wood of the famous
Little Jesus of Atoches in Mexico, which is wor-
shipped by all the people in that region. It has been
her constant companion and protector for fifty years.
Over the altar is a canopy of calico, decorated with
paper flowers, whirligigs, doves, and little goui-ds;
with votive offerings, also, of gold or silver, from
grateful people helped or cured by the Little Jesus.
On the statuette's head is a tiny hat of real gold, and
a real gold sceptre in the little hand ; the breast of its
fine white linen cambric gown is pinned by a gold
pin. It has a wardrobe with as many changes as an
actor. She keeps these carefully hid away in a small
camphor-wood trunk, but she brought them all out
to show to us.

Two of her barefooted ragged little pupils scamr
pered in as she was unfolding these gay doll's clothes.

iQO Glimpses of California

They crowded close around her knees and looked on,
with open-mouthed awe and admiration: a purple
velvet cape with white fringe for feast days ; capes
of satin, of brocade ; a dozen shirts of finest linen,
embroidered or trimmed with lace; a tiny plume not
more than an inch long, of gold exquisitely carved, —
this was her chief treasure. It looked beautiful in
Tiis hat, she said, but it was too valuable to wear
often. Hid away here among the image's best
clothes were more of the gold votive offerings it had
received : one a head cut out of solid gold ; several
rosaries of carved beads, silver and gold. Spite of
her apparently unbounded faith in the Little Jesus'
power to protect her and himself, the old woman
thought it wiser to keep these valuables concealed
from the common gaze.

Holding up a silken pillow some sixteen inches
square, she said, " You could not guess with what
that pillow is filled." We could not, indeed. It
was her own hair. With pride she asked us to take
it in our hands, that we might see how heavy it was.
For sixteen years she had been saving it, and it
was to be put under her head in her coffin. The
friend who had taken us to her home exclaimed on
hearing this, "And I can tell you it was beautiful
hair. I recollect it forty-five yeara ago, bright brown,
and down to her ankles, and enough of it to roll her-
self up in." The old woman nodded and laughed,
much pleased at this compliment. She did not know
why the Lord had preserved her life so long, she

Echoes in the City of the Angels 191

said; but she was very happy. Her nieces had
asked her to go and live with them in Santa Ana ;
but she could not go away from San Gabriel. She
told them that there was plenty of wat^r in the ditch
close by her door, and that God would take care of
the rest, and so he had ; she never wants for any-
thing; not only is she never hungry herself, but
she always has food to give away. No one would
suppose it, but many people come to eat with her in
her house. God never forgets her one minute. She
is very happy. She is never ill ; or if she is, she has
two remedies, which, in all her life, have never failed
to cure her, and they cost nothing, — saliva and ear-
wax. For a pain, the sign of the cross, made with
saliva on the spot which is in pain, is instantaneously
effective ; for an eruption or any skin disorder, the
application of ear-wax is a sure cure. She is very
glad to live so close to the church ; the Father has
promised her this room as long as she lives ; when
she dies, it will be no trouble, he says, to pick her up
and carry her across the road to the church. In a
gay painted box, standing on two chairs, so as to be
kept from the dampness of the bare earth floor, she
cherishes the few relics of her better days : a shawl
and a ribosa of silk, and two gowns, one of black silk,
one of dark blue satin. These are of the fashions
of twenty years ago ; they were given to her by her
husband. She wears them now when she goes to
church; so it is as if she were " married again," she
says, and is "her husband's work still." She seems

192 Glimpses of California

to be a character well known and held in some
regard by the clergy of her church. When the
bishop returned a few years ago from a visit to
Rome, he brought her a little gift, a carved figure of
a saint. She asked him if he could not get for her
a bit of the relics of Saint Viviano. '* Oh, let alone ! "
he replied; "give you relics? Wait a bit; and as
soon as you die, I'll have you made into relics your-
self." She laughed as heartily, telling this some-
what unecclesiastical rejoinder, as if it had been
made at some other peraon's expense.

In the marvellously preserving air of California,
added to her own contented temperament, there is no
reason why this happy old lady should not last, as
some of her Indian neighbors have, well into a second
century. Before she ceases from her peaceful, pitiful
little labors, new generations of millionaires in her
country will no doubt have piled up bigger fortunes
than this generation ever dreams of, but there will
not be a man of them all so rich as she.

In the western suburbs of Los Angeles is a low
adobe house, built after the ancient style, on three
sides of a square, surrounded by orchards, vine-
yards, and orange groves, and looking out on an
old-fashioned garden, in which southernwood, rue,
lavender, mint, marigolds, and gillyflowers hold their
own bravely, growing in straight and angular beds
among the newer splendors of verbenas, roses, carna-
tions, and geraniums. On two sides of the house runs a
broad porch, where stand rows of geraniums and chrys-

Echoes in the City of the Angels 193

atitbemums growing in odd-shaped earthen pots. Here
may often be seen a beautiful young Mexican woman,
flitting about among the plants, or sporting with a
superb Saint Bernard dog. Her clear olive skin, soft
brown eyes, delicate sensitive Dostrils, and broad
smiling mouth, are all of the Spanish madonna type ;
and when her low brow is bound, as is often her wont,
by tui'ban folds of soft brown or green gauze, her
face becomes a picture indeed. She is the young
wife of a gray-headed Mexican sefior, of whom — by
his own most gracious permission — I shall speak by
his familiar name, Don Antonio. Whoever baa the
fortune to pass as a friend across the threshold of
this house finds himself transported, as by a miracle,
into the life of a lialf-centuiy ago. The rooms are
ornameuted with fans, sheila, feather and wax flowers,
pictures, saints' images, old laces, and stuffs, in the
quaint gay Mexican fashion. On the day when I
first saw them, they were brilliant with bloom. In
every one of the deep window-seats stood a cone of
bright flowers, its base made by large white datura
blossoms, their creamy whorls all turned outward,
making a superb decoration. I went for but a few
moments' call. I stayed three hours, and left carry-
ing vrith me bewildering treasures of pictures of the
olden time.

Don Antonio speaks little English ; but the seBora
knows just enough of the language to make her use
of it delicious, as she translates for her husband. It
is an entrancing sight to watch his dark weather-

194 Glimpses of California

beaten face, full of lightning changes as he pours out
torrents of his nervous, eloquent Spamsh speech ;
watching his wife intently, hearkening to each word
she uses, sometimes interrupting her urgently with,
"No, no; that is not it," — for he well understands
the tongue he cannot or will not use for himself.
He is sixty-five years of age, but he is young : the
best waltzer in Los Angeles to-day; his eye keen,
his blood fiery quick ; his memory like a burning-glass
bringing into sharp light and focus a half-century aa
if it were a yesterday. Full of sentunent, of an in-
tense and poetic nature, he looks back to the lost em-
pire of his race and people on the California shores
with a sorrow far too proud for any antagonisoia
or complaints. He recognizes the inexorableness
of the laws under whose workings his nation is
slowly, surely giving place to one more representa-
tive of the age. Intellectually he is in sympathy
with progress, with reform, with civilization at its
utmost; he would not have had them stayed or
changed, because bis people could not keep up and
were not ready. But his heart is none the less
saddened and lonely.

This is probably the position and point of view of
most cultivated Mexican men of his age, The suffer-
ing involved in it is inevitable. It ia part of the
great, unreckoned price which must always be paid for
the gain the world gets when the young and strong
supersede the old and weak.

A sunny little southeast comer room in Don An.

Echoes in the City of the Angels 1 97

tooio's house iB full of the relics of tlie time when he
and his father were foremost representatives of ideas
and progi-ess in the City of the Angels, and taught
the first school that was kept in the place. This was
nearly a half-century ago. On the walls of the room
still hang maps and charts which they used ; and
carefully preserved, with the tender reverence of
which only poetic natures are capable, are still to be
seen there the old atlases, primers, catechiaiuH, gram-
mars, reading-books, which meant toil and trouble to
the merry, ignorant children of the merry and igno-
rant people of that time.

The leathern covers of the boobs are thin and
frayed by long handling; the edges of the leaves
worn down as if mice had gnawed them : tattered,
loose, hanging by yellow threads, tliey look far older
than they are, and bear vivid recoiHl of the days when
books were so rare and precious that each book did
doubled and redoubled duty, passing from hand to
hand and house to house. It was on the old Lan-
caster system that Loa Angeles set out in educating
ita children ; and here are still preserved the formal
and elaborate inatmctiona for teachers and schools on
that plan; also volumes of Spain's laws for military
judges in 1781, and a quaint old volume called
"Secrets of Agriculture, Fields and Pastures,"
written by a Catholic Father in 1617, reprinted in
1781, and held of great value in its day as a sure
guide to success with crops. Accompanying it was
a chart, a perpetual circle, by which might be foretold

198 Glimpses of California

with certainty what years would be barren and what
ones fruitful.

Almanacs, histories, arithmetics, dating back to
1750, drawing-books, multiplication tables, music,
and bundles of records of the branding of cattle at
the San Gabriel Mission, are among the curiosities
of this room. The music of the first quadrilles
ever danced in Mexico is here : a ragged pamphlet,
which, no doubt, went gleeful rounds in the City
of the Angels for many a year. It is a merry music,
simple in melody, but with an especial qualily of
light-heartedness, suiting the people who danced
to it

There are also in the little room many relics of a
more substantial sort than tattered papers and books :
a branding-iron and a pair of handcuffs fi*om the San
Gabriel Mission ; curiously decorated clubs and sticks
used by the Indians in their games ; boxes of silver
rings and balls made for decoi-ations of bridles and
on leggings and knee-breeches. The place of honor
in the room is given, as well it might be, to a small
cannon, the first cannon brouglit into California. It
was made in 1717, and was brought by Father
Junipero Serra to San Diego in 1769. Afterward it
was given, to the San Gabriel Mission, but it still
bears its old name, " San Diego." It is an odd little
arm, only about two feet long, and requiring but six
ounces of powder. Its swivel is made with a rest to
set firm in the ground. It has taken many long
journeys on the backs of mules, having been in great

Echoes in the City of the Angels 199

requisition in the early mission days for the firit^ of
salutes at festivals and feasts.

Don Antonio was but a lad when his father's
family removed from the citj of Mexico to Califoiim.
They came in one of the many unfortunate coloniea
sent out by the Mexican Government during the first
years of the secularization jjeriod, having had a toil-
some and suffering two months, going in wagons
from Mexico to San Bias, then a tedious and uncom-
fortable voyage of several weeks from San Bias to
Monterey, where they arrived only to find them-
selves deceived and disappointed in every particular,
and surrounded by hostilities, plotfi, and dangers
on all sides. So great was the antagonism to them
that it was at times difficult for a colonist to obtain
food fram a Californian. They were arrested on
false pretences, thrown into prison, shipped off like
convicts from place to place, with no one to protect
them or plead their cause. Revolution succeeded upon
revolution, and it was a most unhap'py period for all
refined and cultivated persons who had joined the
colony enterprises. Young men of education and
breeding were glad to earn their daily bread by any
menial labor that offered. Don Antonio and several
of his young friends, who had all studied medicine
together, spent the greater part of a year in making
shingles. The one hope and aim of most of them
was to earn money enough to get back to Mexico.
Don i\j)tonio, however, seems to have hati more versa-
tility and capacity than his friends, for he never lost

200 Glimpses of California

courage ; and it was owing to liitn that al la^t bis
whole family gathered in Los Angeles and established
a home there. Tbia was in 1836. There were then
only about eight hundred people in the pueblo, and the
customs, superstitious, and ignorances of the earliest
days still held sway. The missions were still rich and
powerful, though the confusions and conflicts of their
ruin had begun. At this time the young Antonio,
being quick at accounts and naturally ingenious at all
sorts of mechanical crafts, found profit as well as
pleasure in journeying from mission to mission, some-
times spending two or three months in one place,
keeping books, or repairing silver and gold orna-
ments. The blowpipe which he made for himself at
that time his wife exhibits now with affectionate pride ;
and there are few things she enjoys better tlian trans-
lating to an eager listener his graphic stories of the
incidents and adventures of that portion of his life.

While he was at the San Antonio Mission, a strange
thing happened. It is a good illustration of the
stintless hospitality of those old missions, that staying
there at that time were a notorious gambler and a
celebrated juggler who had come out in the colony
from Mexico. The juggler threatened to turn the
gambler into a crow ; the gambler, after watching his
tricks for a short time, became frightened, and asked
young Antonio, in serious good faith, if he did not
believe the juggler had made a league with the devil.
A few nights afterward, at midnight, a terrible noise
was heard in the gambler's room. He was found in

Echoes in the City of the Angels 201

convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and crying, " Oh,
Father I Father ! I have got the devil inside of me 1
Take him away I " The priest dragged him into the
chapel, showered him with holy water, and exorcised
the devil, first making the gambler promise to leave
off his gambling forever. All the rest of the night
the rescued sinner spent in the chapel, praying and
weeping. In the morning he announced his inten-
tion of becoming a priest, and began his studies at
once. These he faithfully pursued for a year, leading
all the while a life of great devotion. At the end of
that time preparations were made for his ordination
at San Jos^. The day was set, the hour came : he
was in the sacristy, had put on the sacred vestments,
and was just going toward the church door, when he
fell to the floor, dead. Soon after this the juggler was
banished from the country, trouble and disaster hav-
ing everywhere followed on his presence.

On the first breaking out of hostilities between
California and the United States, Don Antonio took
command of a company of Los Angeles volunteers to
repel the intruders. By this time he had attained a
prominent position in the affairs of the pueblo ; had
been alcalde and, under Governor Michelorena,
inspector of public works. It was like the fighting
of children, — the impetuous attempts that heteroge-
neous little bands of Californians here and there
made to hold their country. They were plucky from
first to last ; for they were everywhere at a disadvan-
tage, and fought on, quite in the dark as to what

Z02 Glimpses of California

Mexico meant to do about them, — whether she
might not any morning deliver them over to the
enemy. Of all Don Antonio's grapliic narratives of
the olden time, none is more interesting than those
which describe his adventures during the days of this
contest. On one of the first approaches matle hy the
Americans to Los Angeles, he went out with his little
haphazard company of men and boys to meet them.
He had but one cannon, a small one, tied by ropes on
a cart axle. He had but one small keg of powder
which was good for anything ; all the rest was bad,
would merely go off " jKnif, pouf," the seSora said,
and the hall would pop down near the mouth of the
cannon. With this bad powder he fired his first
shots. Tlie Americans laughed ; this is child's play,
they said, and pushed on closer. Then came a good
shot, with the good powder, tearing into their ranks
and knocking them right and left; another, and
another. " Then the Americans began to think, these
are no pouf balls ; and when a few more were killed,
they ran away and left their flag behind them. And
if they had only known it, the Califomians had only
one more charge left of the good powder, and the next
minute it would have been the Califomians that would
have had to run away themselves," merrily laughed
the sefiora, as she told the tale.

This captured flag, with important papers, was
intrusted to Don Antonio to carrj' to the Mexican
headquarters at Sonora. lie set off with an escort of
Boldieis, his horse decked with silver trappings ; his

Echoes in the City of the Atigcls 203

eword, pistola, all of the finest : a proud beginning of
a journey destined to end in a different fashion. It
was in winter time; cold rains were falling. By
night he was drenched to the skin, and stopped at a
friendly Indian's tent to change liis clotlies. Hardly
had he got them off when the sound of horses' hoofs
was heard. The Indian flung himself down, put hia
ear to the ground, and exclaimed, " Americanos 1
Americanos ! " Almost in the same second they
were at the tent's door. As they halted, Don Antonio,
clad only in his drawers and stockings, crawled out
at the back of the tent, and creeping on all fours
reached a tree, up which he climbed, and sat safe
hidden in the darkness among its branches listening,
while his pursuers cross-questioned the Indian, and
at last rode away with his horse. Luckily, he had
carried into the tent the precious papers and the cap-
tured flag : these he intrusted to an Indian to take to
Sonora, it being evidently of no use for him to try to
croas the country thus closely pursued by his enemies.
All night he lay hidden; the next day he walked
twelve miles across the mountains to an Indian vil-
lage where he hoped to get a horse. It was dark
when he reached it. Cautiously he opened the door
of the hut of one whom he knew well. The Indian
was preparing poisoned arrows ; fixing one on the
string and aiming at the door, he called out angrily,
"Who is there?" — "It is I. Antonio." — "Don't
make a sound," whispered the Indian, throwing
down his arrow, springing to the door, coming out,

204 Glimpses of California

and closing it softly. He then proceeded to tell him
that the Americans had offered a rewurd for bis head,
and that some of the Indians in the rancheria were
ready to betray or kill him. While they were yet
talking, again came the sound of the Americans'
horses' hoofs galloping in the distance. This time
there seemed no escape. Suddenly Don Antonio,
throwing himself on his stomach, wriggled into a cac-
tus patch near by. Only one who has seen California
cactus thickets can realize the desperateness of this
act. But it succeeded. The Indian threw over the
cactus plants an old blanket and some I'efuse stalks
and reeds ; and there once more, within hearing of all
his baffled pursuers said, the hunted man lay, safe,
thanks to Indian friendship. The crafty Indian as-
Bente<l to all the Americana proposed, said that Don
Antonio would be sure to be caught in a few days,
advised them to search in a certain rancheria which
he described, a few miles off, and in an opposite
direction from the way in which he intended to
guide Don Antonio. As soon as the Americans had
gone, he bound up Antonio's feet in strips of raw-
hide, gave him a blanket and an old tattered hat,
the best his stores afforded, and then led him by a
long and difficult trail to a spot high up in the moun-
tains where the old women of the band were gather-
ing acorns. By the time they reached this place,
blood was trickling from Antonio's feet and legs,
and he was weU-nigh fainting with fatigue and ex-
■ citoment. Tears rolled down the old women's cheeks

Echoes in the City of the Angels 205

when they saw him. Some of them had been ser-
vants in his father's house, and loved him. One
brought gruel; another bathed his feet; others ran
in search of healing leaves of different sorts. Bruis-
ing these in a stone mortar, they rubbed him from
head to foot with the wet fibre. All his pain and
weariness vanished as by magic. His wounds healed,
and in a day he was ready to set off for home. There
was but one pony in the old women's camp. This
was old, vicious, blind of one eye, and with one ear
cropped short; but it looked to Don Antonio far
more beautiful than the gay steed on which he had
ridden away from Los Angeles three days before.
There was one pair of ragged shoes of enormous size
among the old women's possessions. These were
strapped on his feet by leathern thongs, and a bit of
old sheepskin was tied around the pony's body.
Thus accoutred and mounted, shivering in his draw-
ers under his single blanket, the captain and flag-
bearer turned his face homeward. At the first
friend's house he reached he stopped and begged for
food. Some dried meat was given to him, and a
stool on the porch offered to him. It was the house
of a dear friend, and the friend's sister was his sweet-
heart. As he sat there eating his meat, the women
eyed him curiously. One said to the other, "How
much he looks like Antonio ! " At last the sweet-
heart, coming nearer, asked him if he were "any
relation of Don Antonio." " No," he said. Just at
that moment his friend rode up, gave one glance at

2o6 Glimpses of California

the pitiful beggar sitting on Ids porch, shouted hia
name, dashed toward him, and seized him in his
arms. Then was a great hiiighing and half-weeping,
for it had been rumored tliat he had been taken
priaoner by the Americans.

From thia friend he received a welcome gift of a
pair of trousers, many inches too short for his legs.
At the next house his friend was as much too tall,
and his second pair of gift trousers had to he rolled
up in thick folds around liis ankles.

Finally he reached Los Angeles in safety. Halting
in a grove outside the town, he waited till twilight
before entering. Having disguised himself in the I'ags
which he had worn from the Indian village, he i-ode
boldly up to the porch of his father's house, and in an
impudent tone called for brandy. The terrified women
began to scream ; but his youngest sister, fixing one
piercing glance on his face, laughed out gladly, and
cried, " You can't fool me ; you are Antonio."

Sitting in the little corner room, looking out
through the open door on the gay garden and breath-
ing its spring air, gay even in midwinter, and as
spicy then as the gardens of other lands are in June,
I spent many an afternoon listening to such tales as
this. Sunset always came long before its time, it
seemed, on these days.

Occasionally, at the last moment, Don Antonio
would take up his guitar, and, in a voice still sym-
pathetic and full of melody, sing an old Spanish
love-song, brought to his mind by thus living over

Echoes in the City of the Angels 209

the events of his youth. Never, however, in his
most ardent youth, could his eyes have gazed on his
fairest sweetheart's face with a look of greater devo-
tion than that with which they now rest on the noble,
expressive countenance of his wife, as he sings the
ancient and tender strains. Of one of tliem I ouce
won from her, amid laughs and blushes, a few words
of translation: —

" Let UB hear the sweet echo
Of your sweet voice that charniH me.
The one that truly loseB jou,
He Bay a be wiahes to lo»e ;
That the one who with ardent love adores you,
Will aacrifice himself for you.
Do not deprive ine,

Tof n

Of that a'
Of your sweet

ice that charma d

Near the western end of Don Antonio's porch is an
orange-tree, on which were hanging at this time
twenty-five hundred oranges, ripe and golden among
the glossy leaves. Under this tree my carriage al-
ways waited for me. The seSora never allowed me
to depart without bringing to me, in the carriage,
farewell gifts of flowers and fruit : clusters of grapes,
dried and fresh ; great boughs full of oranges, more
than I could lift. As I drove away thus, my lap
filled with bloom and golden fruit, canopies of
^^^ golden fruit over my head, I said to myself often:
^^L " Fables axe prophecies. The Uesperides have come
^^B true."

OUTDOOR INDUSTRIES IN SOUTHERN

CALIFORNIA

OUTDOOR INDUSTRIES IN SOUTHERN

CALIFORNIA

Clucate is to a countiy what temperament is to a
man, — Fate. The figure ia not so fanciful as it
aeems; for temperament, broadly defined, may be
said to be that which determines the point of view
of a man's mental and spiritual vision, — in other
words, the light in which he sees things. And the
word " climate " is, primarily, simply a statement of
bounds defined according to the obliquity of the sun's
course relative to the horizon, ^ in other words, the
slant of the sun. The tropics are tropic because the
sun shines down too straight. Vegetation leaps into
luxuriance under the nearly vertical ray : but human
activities languish ; intellect is supine ; only the pas-
sions, human nature's rank weed-growths, thrive. In
the temperate zone, again, the sun strikes the earth
too much aslant. Human activities develop ; intellect
is keen ; the balance of passion and reason is nor-
mally adjusted : but vegetation is slow and restricted.
Ab compared with the productiveness of the tropics,
the best that the temperate zone can do is scanty.

There are a few spots on the globe where the oon-
ditionB of the country override these laws, and do

214 Glimpses of California

away with these lines of (iiacriminatirto in favors.
Florida, Italy, the South of France and of Spain, a
few islands, and South California complete the list,

These places are doubly dowered. They have the
wealths of the two zones, without the drawbacks of
either. In South California this results from two
causes: first, the presence of a temperate current
in the ocean, near the coast; second, the configura-
tion of the mountain ranges which intercept and
reflect the sun's rays, and shut South California off
from the rest of the continent. It is, as it were,
climatically insulated, — a sort of island on land. It
has just enough of sea to make its atmosphere tem-
perate. Its continental position and affinities give it
a dryness no island could have ; and its climatically
insulated position gives it an evenness of temperature
much beyond the continental average.

It has thus a cool summer and a temperate winter,
— conditions which secure the broadest and highest
agricultural and liorti cultural possibilities. It is the
only country in the world where dairies and orange
orchards will thrive together.

It has its own zones of climate ; not at all follow-
ing lines parallel to the equator, but following the
trend of its mountains. The California mountains are
a big and interesting family of geological children,
with great gaps in point of age, the Sierra Nevada
being oldest of all. Time was when the Sierra Nevada
fronted directly on the Pacific, and its rivcre dashed
down straight into the sea. But that is ages ago.

Industries in Southern California 215

Since then have been born out of the waters the
numerous coast ranges, all following more or less
closely the shore line. These are supplemented at
Point Conception by east and west ranges, which
complete the insulating walls of South, or semi-tropic,
California. The coast ranges are the youngest of the
children born; but the ocean is still pregnant of
others. Range after range, far out to sea, they lie
with their attendant valleys, biding their time, pop-
ping their heads out here and there in the shape of
islands.

This colossal furrow system of mountains must
have its correlative system of valleys; hence the
great valley divisions of the country. There may be
said to be four groups or kinds of these : the low and
broad valleys, so broad that they are plains ; the high
mountain valleys ; the rounded plateaus of the Great
Basin, as it is called, of which the Bernardino Moun-
tains are the southern rim; and the river valleys
or cafions, — these last running at angles to the
mountain and shore lines.

When the air in these valleys becomes heated by
the sun, it rushes up the slopes of the Sierra Nevada
as up a mighty chimney. To fill the vacuum thus
created, the sea air is drawn in through every break
in the coast ranges as by a blower. In the upper
part of the California coast it sucks in with fury, as
through the Golden Gate, piling up and demolishing
high hills of sand every year, and cutting grooves on
the granite fronts of mountains.

2i6 Glimpses of California

The country may be said to have three distinot
industrial belts : the first, along the coast, a narrow
one, from one to fifteen miles wide. In this grow
some of the deciduous fruits, corn, pumpkins, and
grain. Dairy and stock interests flourish. The near-
ness of the sea makes the air cool, with fogs at night.
There are many dinagai, or maiBhy regions, where
grass is green all the year round, and water is near
the surface everywhere. Citrus fruits do not flourish
in this belt, except in sheltered spots at the higher
levels.

The second industrial belt comprises the shorter
valleys opening toward the sea; a belt of country
averaging perhaps forty miles in width. In thU belt
all grains will grow without irrigation; all decid-
uous fruits, including the grape, flourish well with-
out irrigation ; the citrus frnita thrive, but need
irrigation.

The third belt lies back of this, farther from the sea;
and the land, without irrigation, is worthless for all
purposes except pasturage. That, in years of average
rainfall, is good.

The soils of South California are chiefly of the
cretaceous and tertiary epochs. The most remarkable
thing about them is their great depth- It is not
uncommon, in making wells, to find the soil the same
to a depth of one hundred feet; the same thing is to
be observed in caHons, cuts, and exposed bluffs on
the sea-shore. This accounts for the great fertility
of much of the land. Crops are raised year &ft«r

Industries in Southern California 217

year, sometimes for twenty suceeBsive years, on the
same fields, without the soil's showing exhaustion ;
and what are called volunteer crops, sowing them-
selves, give good yields for the fii-st, second, and even
third year after the original planting.

To provide for a wholesome variety and succession
of seasons, in a country where both winter and sum-
mer were debarred full reign, was a meteorological
problem that might well have puzzled even Nature's
ingenuity. But nest to a vacuum, she abhors monot^
ony ; and to avoid it, she has, in California, resorted
even to the water-cure, — getting her requisite atter-
natioQ of seasons by making one wet and the other
dry-
To define the respective limite of these seasons
becomes more and more difficult the longer one stays
in California, and the more one studies rainfall sta-
tistics. Generally speaking, the wet season may be
said to be from the middle of October to the middle of
April, corresponding nearly with the outside limits of
the north temperate zone season of snows. A good
description of the two seasons would be — and it is
not so purely humorous and unscientific as it sounds
— that the wet season is the season in which it can
rain, but may not ; and the dry season is the season
in which it cannot rain, but occasionally does.

Sometimes the rains expected and hoped for in
October do not begin until March, aud the whole
country is in anxiety ; a, drought in the wet season
meaning drought for a year, and great losses. There

2i8 Glimpses of California

have been such years in California, and the dread of
them is well founded. But often the rains, coming
later than their wont, are so full and steady that the
requisite numlxjr of inches fall, and the year's supply
is made good. The avemge rainfall in San Diego
County is ten inches ; in Ijos Angeles, San Bernar-
dino, and Ventura counties, fifteen ; in Santa Barbara,
twenty. These five counties are all that prop-
erly come under the name of South California,
resting the division on natural and climatic grounds.
The political division, if ever made, will be based on
other than natural or climatic reasons, and will
include two, possibly three, more counties.

The pricelessness of water in a land where no rain
falls during six months of the year cannot be appre-
ciated by one who has not lived in such a country.
There is a saying in South California that if a man
buys water he can get his land thrown in. This is
only an epigrammatic putting of the literal fact that
the value of much of the land depends solely upon
the water which it holds or controls.

Four systems of irrigation are practised: First,
flooding the land. This is possible only in flat dis-
tricts, where there are large heads of water. It is a
wasteful method, and is less and less used each year.
The second system is by furrows. By this system a
large head of water is brought upon the land and dis-
tributed in small streams in many narrow furrows.
The streams are made as small as will run across the
ground, and are allowed to run only twenty-four hours

I
I

Industries in Southern California 221

at a time. The third system is by basins dug around
tree roots. To these basins water is brought by pipes
or ditches ; or, in mountain lands, by flumes. The
fourth system is by sub-irrigation. This is the most
expensive system of all, but is thought to economize
water. The water is carried in pipes laid from two
to tlu-ee feet under ground. By opening valvea in
these pipes the water is let out and up, but never
comes above the surface.

The appliances of one sort and another belonging
to these irrigation systems add much to the pictur-
esqueness of South California landscapes. Even the
huge, tower-like, round-fanned windmills by which
the water is pumped up are sometiraes, spite of their
clumsiness, made effective by gay colors and by vines
growing on them. If they had broad, stretching arms,
like the Holland windmills, the whole country would
seem a-flutter.

The history of the industries of South California
since the American occupation is intei-esting in its
record of successions, — successions not the result of
human interventions and decisions so much as of
climatic fate, which in epoch after epoch created
different situations.

The history begins with the cattle interest ; hardly
an industry, perhaps, or at any rate an unindustrious
one, but belonging in point of time at the head of the
list of the ways and means by which money has been
made in the country. It dates back to the old
mission days, — to the two hundred head of cattle

222 Glimpses of California

which the wise Galvez brought, in 1769, for stocking
the three missions projected in Upper California.

From these had grown, in the sixty years of the
friars' unhindered rule, lierds of which it is no exag^
geration to say that tliey covered thousands of hills
and were beyond counting. It is probable that even
the outside estimates of tlieir numbers were short of
the truth. The cattle wealth, the reckless ruin of the
secularization- period, survived, and was the leading
wealth of the country at the lime of its surrender to
the United States. It was most wafltefuUy handled.
The cattle were killed, as they had been in the mission
days, simply for their hides and tallow. Kingdoms
full of people nught have been fed on the beef which
rotted on the ground every year, and the California
cattle ranch in which eitlier milk or butter could be
found was an exception to the rule.

Into the calm of this half-barbaric life broke the
fierce excitement of the gold discovery in 1849. The
Bwanning hordes of ravenous miners must be fed;
beef meant gold. The cattlemen suddenly found in
their herds a new source of undreamed-of riches.
Cattle had been sold as low as two dollars and a half
a head. When the gold fever was at its highest,
there were days and places in which tliey sold for
three hundred. It is not strange that the rancheroa
lost their heads, grew careless and profligate.

Then came the drought of 1864, which killed off
cattle by thousands of thousands. By thousands they
were driven over steep places into the sea to save

Industries in Southern California 223

pasturage, and to save the country from the stench
and the poison of their dying of hunger. In April of
that year fifty thousand head were sold in Santa
Barbara for thirty-seven and a half cents a head.
Many of the rancheros were ruined; they had to
mortgage their lands to live ; their stock was gone ;
they could not farm ; values so sank that splendid
estates were not worth over ten cents an acre.

Then came in a new set of owners. From the north
and from the interior poured in the thriftier sheep
men, with big flocks ; and for a few years the wide
belt of good pasturage land along the coast was
chiefly a sheep country.

Slowly farmers followed ; settling, in the beginning,
around town centres such as Los Angeles, Santa
Barbara, Ventura. Grains and vegetables were grown
for a resource when cattle and sheep should fail
Cows needed water all the year round; corn only a
few months. A wheat-field might get time to ripen
in a year when by reason of a drought a herd of
cattle would die.

Thus the destiny of the country steadily went on
toward its fulfilling, because the inexorable logic of
the situation forced itself into the minds of the popu-
lation. From grains and vegetables to fruits was a
short and natural step, in the balmy air, under the
sunny sky, and with the traditions and relics of the
old friars' opulent fruit growths lingering all through
the land. Each palm, orange-tree, and vineyard left
on the old mission sites was a way-signal to the new

224 Glimpses of California

peoples; mute, yet so eloquent, the wonder is that so
many years should hare elapsed before the road began
to be thronged.

Such, in brief, is the chronicle of the development
of South California's outdoor industries down to the
present time; of tJie successions through which the
country has been making ready to become what it
will surely be, the Garden of the world, — a garden
with which no other country can vie ; a garden in
which will grow, side by side, the grape and the
pumpkin, the pear and the orange, the olive and the
apple, the strawberry and the lemon, Indian com and
the banana, wheat and the guava.

The leading position which the fruit interest will
ultimately take has been reached only in Los Angeles
County. There the four chief industries, ranged
according to their relative importance, stand as fol-
lows ; Fruit, grain, wool, stock, and dairy. This
county may be said to be pre-eminently the garden of
the Garden. No other of the five counties can com-
pete with it. Its fruit harvest is nearly unintermitted
all the year round. The maiu orange crop ripens
from January to May, though oranges hang on the
trees all the year. The lemon, lime, and citron ripen
and hang, like the orange. Apricots, pears, peaches,
nectarines, strawberries, currants, and figs are plenti-
ful in June ; apples, pears, peaches, during July and
August. Late in July grapes begin, and last till
January, September is the best month of all, having
grapes, peaches, pomegranates, walnuts, almonds, and

226 Glimpses of California

springs and streams ministering to their system is
owned, rated, utilized, and, one might almost add,
wrangled over. The cha^^ters of these water litiga-
tions are many and full ; and it behooves every new
settler in the county to inform himself on that ques-
tion first of all, and thoroughly.

In the Los Angeles valley lie several lesser valleys,
fertile and beautiful ; most notable of these, the San
Gabriel valley, where was the site of the old San
Gabriel Mission, twelve miles east of the town of Los
Angeles. This valley is now taken up in large
ranches, or in colonies of settlers banded together for
mutual help and security in matter of water rights.
This colony feature is daily becoming more and more
an important one in the development of the whole
country. Small individual proprietors cannot usually
afford the purchase of sufficient water to make horti-
cultural enterprises successful or safe. The incorpo-
rated colony, therefore, offers advantages to large
numbers of settlers of a class that could not otherwise
get foothold in the country, — the men of compara-
tively small means, who expect to work with their
hands, and await patiently the slow growth of mod-
erate fortunes, — a most useful and abiding class,
making a solid basis for prosperity. Some of the best
results in South California have already been attained
in colonies of this sort, such as Anaheim, Riverside,
and Pasadena. The method is regarded with increas-
ing favor. It is a rule of give and take, which works
equally well for both country and settlers.

Industries in Southern California 227

The South California statistics of fruits, grain,
wool, honey, etc., read more like fancy than like fact,
and are not readily believed by one unacquainted with
the country. The only way to get a real comprehen-
sion and intelligent acceptance of them is to study
them on the ground. By a single visit to a great
ranch one is more enlightened than he would be by
committing to memory scores of Equalization Board
Reports. One of the very best, if not the best, for
this purpose is Baldwin's ranch, in the San Gabriel
valley. It includes a large part of the old lands of
the San Gabriel Mission, and is a principality in
itself.

There are over a hundred men on its pay-roll,
which averages $4,000 a month. Another 14,000
does not more than meet its running expenses. It
has $6,000 worth of machinery for its grain harvests
alone. It has a daiiy of forty cows, Jersey and Dur-
ham ; one hundred and twenty work-horses and mules,
and fifty thoroughbreds.

It is divided into four distinct estates : the Santa
Anita, of 16,000 acres ; Puente, 18,000 ; Merced,
20,000; and the Potrero, 25,000. The Puente and
Merced are sheep ranches, and have 20,000 sheep on
them. The Potrero is rented out to small farmers.
The Santa Anita is the home estate. On it are the
homes of the family and of the laborers. It has
fifteen hundred acres of oak grove, four thousand
acres in grain, five hundred in grass for hay, one
hundred and fifty in orange orchards, fifty of almond-

228 Glhnpses of California

trees, sixty of walnuts, twenty-five of pears, fifty of
peaches, twenty of lemons, and five hundred in vines;
also small orchards of chestnuts, hazel-nuts^ and
at)rieots ; and thousands of acres of good pasturage.

From whatever side one approaches Santa Anita in
May, lie will drive through a wild garden, — asters,
yellow and white ; scarlet pentstemons, blue larkspur,
monk's-hood ; lupines, white and blue ; gorgeous
golden eschscholtzia, aide]', wild lilac, white sage, —
all in riotous flowering.

Entering the ranch by one of the north gates, he
will look southward down gentle slopes of orchards
and vineyaixls far across the valley, the tints growing
softer and softer, and blending more and more with
each mile, till all melt into a blue or purple haze.
Driving from orchaid to orchard, down half-mile
avenues through orchards skirting seenjingly endless
stretches of vineyard, he begins to realize what comes
of planting trees and vines by hundreds and tens of
hundreds of acres, and the Equalization Board Statis-
tics no longer appear to him even large. It does
not seem wonderful that Los Angeles County should
be reported as having sixty-two hundred acres in
vines, when here on one man's ranch are five hundred
acres. The last Equalization Board Report said the
county had 256,135 orange and 41,250 lemon trees.
It would hardly have surprised him to be told that
there were as many as that in the Santa Anita groves
alone. The effect on the eye of such huge tracts,
planted with a single sort of tree, is to increase enor-

Industries in Southern California 229

mously the apparent size of the tract; the mind
stumbles on the very threshold of the attempt ta
reckon its distances and numbers, and they become
vaster and vaster as they grow vague.

The orange orchard is not the unqualifiedly beauti-
ful spectacle one dreams it will be ; nor, in fact, is it
so beautiful as it ought to be, with its evergreen
shining foliage, snowy blossoms, and golden fruit
hanging together and lavishly all the year round.
I fancy that if travellers told truth, ninety-nine out
of a hundred would confess to a grievous disappoint-
ment at their first sight of the orange at home. In
South California the trees labor under the great dis-
advantage of being surrounded by bare brown earth.
How much this dulls their effect one realizes on
finding now and then a neglected grove where grass
has been allowed to grow under the trees, to their*
ruin as fruit-bearers, but incomparably heightening
their beauty. Another fatal defect in the orange-tree
is its contour. It is too round, too stout for its
height ; almost as bad a thing in a tree as in a human
being. The uniformity of this contour of the trees,
combined with the regularity of their setting in
evenly spaced rows, gives large orange groves a
certain tiresome quality, which one recognizes with
a guilty sense of being shamefully ungrateful for
so much splendor of sheen and color. The exact
spherical shape of the fruit possibly helps on this
tiresomeness. One wonders if oblong bunches of
long-pointed and curving fruit, banana-like, set ir-

230 Glimpses of California

regularly among the glossy green leaves, would not
look better; which wonder adds to ingratitude an
impertinence, of which one suddenly repents on
seeing such a tree as I saw in a Los Angeles gaiden
in the winter of 1882, — a tree not over thirty feet
high, with twenty-five hundred golden oranges hang-
ing on it, among leaves so glossy they glittered in
the sun with the glitter of burnished metal. Never
the Ilesperides saw a more resplendent sight.

But the oi-ange looks its best plucked and massed ;
it lends itself then to every sort and extent of decora-
tion. At a citrus fair in the Riverside colony in
March, 1882, in a building one hundred and fifty feet
long by sixty wide, built of redwood planks, were
five long tables loaded with oranges and lemons;
rows, plates, pyramids, baskets ; the bright redwood
walls hung with great boughs, full as when broken
from the tree ; and each plate and pyramid decorated
with the shining green leaves. The whole place was
fairly ablaze, and made one think of the Arabian
Nights' Tales. The acme of success in orange cul-
ture in California is said to have been attained in
this Riverside colony, though it is only six years old,
and does not yet number two thousand souls. There
are in its orchards 209,000 orange-trees, of which
28,000 are in bearing, 20,000 lemon-trees, and 8,000
limes.

The profits of orange culture are slow to begin
but, having once begun, mount up fast. Orange
orchards at San Gabriel have in many instances

Industries in Southern California 231

netted $500 an acre annually. The following esti-
mate, the result of sixteen years' experience, is
probably a fair one of the outlay and income of a
small orange grove : —

10 acres of land, at $75 per acre . . .
1000 trees, at $75 per hundred . . .
Ploughing and harrowing, $2.50 per acre
Digging holes, planting, 10 cents each .

Irrigating and planting

Cultivation after irrigation

3 subsequent irrigations during the year
3 subsequent cultivations the first year .

Total cost, first year . . .

$750.00

750.00

20.00

100.00

10.00

9.50

30.00

13.50

$1,683.00

This estimate of cost of land is based on the price of
the best lands in the San Gabriel valley. Fair lands
can be bought in other sections at lower prices.

Second year. — An annual ploughing in Jan-
uary $25.00

Four irrigations during year 40.00

Six cultivations during year 27.00

Third year 125.00

Fourth year 150.00

Fifth year 200.00

Interest on iuvcstmeut 1,000.00

Total $3,250.00

If first-class, healthy, thrifty budded trees are planted,
they will begin to fruit the second year. The third
year, a few boxes may be marketed. The fourth year,
there will be an average yield of at least 75 oranges to
the tree, which will equal:

75,000, at $10 per thousand net $750.00

The fifth year, 250 per tree, 250,000, at $10 per

thousand 2,500.00

Total $3,250.00

232 Glimpses of California

The orchard is now clear gain, allowing $1,000 as
interest on the investment. The increase in the volume
of production will continue, until at the end of the tenth
year an average of 1,000 oranges to a tree would not be
an extraordinary yield.

To all these formulas of reckoning should be
added one with the algebraic x representing the un-
known quantity, and standing for insect enemies at
large. Each kind of fruit has its own, which must
be fought with eternal vigilance. No port in any
country has more rigid laws of quarantine than are
now enforced in California against these insect
enemies. Grafts, cuttings, fruit, if even suspected,
are seized and compelled to go through as severe
disinfecting processes as if they were Cuban passen-
gers fresh from a yellow-fever epidemic.

The orange's worst enemy is a curious insect, the
scale-bug. It looks more like a mildew than like
anything alive; is usually black, sometimes red.
Nothing but violent treatment with tobacco will
eradicate it. Worse than the scale-bug, in that he
works out of sight underground, is the gopher. He
has gnawed every root of a tree bare before a tooth-
mark on the trunk suggests his presence, and then it
is too late to save the tree. The rabbit also is a
pernicious ally in the barking business ; he, however,
being shy, soon disappears from settled localities;
but the gopher stands not in fear of man or men.
Only persistent strychnine on his door-sills and
thrust down his winding stairs, will save the orchard
in which he has founded a community.

Industries in Southern California 233

The almond and the walnut orchards are beautiful
features in the landscape all the year round, no less
in the winter, when their branches are naked, than
in the season of their full leaf and bearing. In fact,
the broad spaces of filmy gray made by their acres
when leafless are delicious values in contrast with
the solid green of the orange orchards. The exquisite
revelation of tree systems which stripped boughs
give is seen to more perfect advantage against a
warm sky than a cold one, and is heightened in effect
standing side by side with the flowing green pepper-
trees and purple eucalyptus.

In the time of blossoms, an almond orchard seen
from a distance is like nothing so much as a rosy-
white cloud, floated off a sunset and spread on the
earth. Seen nearer, it is a pink snow-storm, arrested
and set on stalks, with an orchestra buzz of bees fill-
ing the air.

It is a pity that the almond-tree should not be more
repaying ; for it will be a sore loss to the beauty of
the country when the orchards are gone, and this is
only a question of time. They are being uprooted
and cast out. The crop is a disappointing one, of un-
certain yield, and troublesome to prepare. The nuts
must be five times handled: first picked, then
shucked, then dried, then bleached, and then again
dried. After the first drjdng, they are dipped by
basketfuls into hot water, then poured into the
bleachers, — boxes with perforated bottoms. Under-
neath these is a sulphur fire to which the nuts must

234 Glimpses of California

be exposed for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then
they are again spread in a drying-house. The final
gathering them up to send to market makes really a
sixth handling ; and after all is said and done, the
nuts are not very good, being flavorless in comparison
with those grown in Europe.

The walnut orchard is a better investment, and no
less a delight to the eye. While young, the walnut-
tree is graceful ; when old, it is stately, It is a sturdy
bearer, and if it did not bear at all, would be worth
honorable place and room on large estates, simply for
it8 avenues of generous shade. It is planted in the
seed, and transplanted at two or three years old, with
only twenty-seven trees to an acre. They begin to
bear at ten years, reach full bearing at fifteen, and
do not give sign of failing at fifty.

Most interesting of all South California's outdoor
industries is the grape culture. To speak of grape
culture is to enter upon a subject which needs a vol-
ume. Its history, its riches, past and prospective, its
methods, its beautiful panorama of pictures, each by
itself is worth study and exhaustive treatment. Since
the days of Eshcol, the vine and the vineyard have
been honored in the thoughts and the imaginations of
men ; they furnished shapes and designs for the ear-
liest sacred decorations in the old dispensation, and
suggestions and symbols for divine parables in the
new. No age has been without them, and no country
whose sun was warm enough to make them thrive.
It is safe to predict that so long as the visible frame

Industries in Southern California 235

of the earth endures, " wine to make glad the heart
of man " will be made, loved, celebrated, and sung.

To form some idea of California's future wealth
from the grape culture, it is only necessary to reflect
on the extent of her grape-growing country as com-
pared with that of France. In France, before the
days of the phylloxera, 6,000,000 of people were
supported entirely by the grape industry, and the
annual average of the wine crop was 2,000,000,000
gallons, with a value of $400,000,000. The annual
wine-yield of California is already estimated at about
10,000,000 gallons. Nearly one -third of this is made
in South California, chiefly in Los Angeles County,
where the grape culture is steadily on the increase,
five millions of new vines having been set out in the
spring of 1882.

The vineyards offer more variety to the eye than
the orange orchards. In winter, when leafless, they
are grotesque \ their stocky, twisted, hunchback stems
looking like Hindoo idols or deformed imps, no two
alike in a square mile, all weird, fantastic, uncanny.
Their first leafing out does not do away with this ;
the imps seem simply to have put up green umbrel-
las ; but presently the leaves widen and lap, hiding
the uncouth trunks, and spreading over all the vine-
yard a beautiful, tender green, with lights and shades
breaking exquisitely in the hollows and curves of the
great leaves. From this on, through all the stages
of blossoms and seed-setting, till the clusters are so
big and purple that they gleam out everywhere be-

236 Glimpses of California

tween the leaves, — sometimes forty-five pounds on
a single vine, if the vine is irrigated, twelve if it is
left to itijelf. Eight tons of grapes off one acre have
been taken in the Baldwin ranch. There were made
there, in 1881, 100,000 gallons of wine and 60,000 of
brandy. The vintage begins late in August, and
lasts many weeks, some varieties of grapes ripening
later than others. The vineyards are thronged with
Mexican and Indian pickers. The Indians come in
bands, and pitch their tents just outside the vineyard.
I'hey are good workers. The wine-cellars and the
great crushing-vats tell the vineyards' story more
emphatically even than the statistical figures, A vat
that will hold 1,000 gallons piled full of grapes, huge
wire wheels driving round and round in the spurting,
foaming mass, the juice flying off through trough-like
shoots on each side into seventy great vats ; below,
breathless men working the wheels, loads of grapes
coming up momently and being poured into the
swirling vat, the whole air reeking with winy flavor.
The scene makes earth seem young again, old myth-
ologies real ; and one would not wonder to see Bac-
chus and his leopards come bowling up, with shouting
Pan behind.

The cellars are still, dark, and fragrant. Forty-eight
great oval-shaped butts, ten feet in diameter, holding
2,100 gallons each, I counted in one cellar. The
butts are made of Michigan oak, and have a fine
yellow color, which contrasts well with the red stream
of the wine when it is drawn.

Industries in Southern California 237

Notwithstanding the increase of the grape culture,
the price of grapes is advancing,, some estimates mak-
ing it forty per cent higher than it was five years ago.
It is a quicker and probably a more repaying indus-
try than orange-growing. It is reckoned that a vine-
yard in its fourth year will produce two tons to the
acre ; in the seventh year, four ; the fourth year it
will be profitable, reckoning the cost of the vineyard
at sixty dollars an acre, exclusive of the first cost
of the land. The annual expense of cultivation,
picking, and handling is about twenty-five dollars.
The rapid increase of this culture has been marvel-
lous. In 1848 there were only 200,000 vines in all
California; in 1862 there were 9,500,000; in 1881,
64,000,000, of which at least 34,000,000 are in full
bearing.

Such facts and figures are distressing to the advo-
cates of total abstinence ; but they may take heart
in the thought that a by no means insignificant pro-
portion of these gi*apes will be made into raisins,
canned, or eaten fresh.

The raisin crop was estimated at 160,000 boxes for
1881. Many grape-growers believe that in raisin-mak-
ing will ultimately be found the greatest profit. The
Americans are a raisin-eating people. From Malaga
alone are imported annually into the United States
about ten tons of raisins, one-half the entire crop of
the Malaga raisin district. This district has an area
of only about four hundred square miles. In Cali-
fornia an area of at least twenty thousand square
miles is adapted to the raisin.

238 Glimpses of California

A moderate estimate of the entire annual grape
crop of California is 119,000 tons. " Allowing 60,000
tons to be used in making wines, 2,000 tons to be sent
fresh to the Eastern States, and 5,000 tons to be
madf into raisins, there would still remain 52,000
tons to be eaten fresh or wasted, — more than one
hundred pounds for each resident of Califoniia, in-
cluding children." ^

The California wines are as yet of inferior quality.
A variety of still wines and three champagnes are
made ; but even the best are looked on with distrust
and disfavor by connoisseurs, and until they greatly
improve they will not command a ready market in
Aineri(*a. At ])resent it is to be feared that a large
])io2X)ition of them are sold under foreign labels.

Prominent among the minor industries is honey-
making. From tlie great variety of flowers and their
spicy flavor, especirJly from the aromatic sages, the
honey is said to have a unique and delicious taste,
resembling that of the famous honey of Hymettus.

The crop for 1881, in the four southern counties,
was estimated at three millions of pounds ; a statistic
that must seem surprising to General Fremont, who,
in his report to Congress of explorations on the Pa-
cific coast in 1844, stated that the honey-bee could
not exist west of the Sierra Nevadas.

The bee ranches are always picturesque ; they are
usually in cafions or on wooded foot-hills, and their

^ John G. Hittell's Commerce auJ Industries of the Pacific Coast.

240 Glimpses of California

that the profound respect they are forced to entertain
for insects so small and so wholly at their mercy
should give them enlarged standards in many things ;
above all, should breed in them a fine and just humil-
ity toward all creatures.

A striking instance of this is to be seen in one of
the most beautiful caflons of the San Gabriel valley,
where, living in a three-roomed, redwood log cabin,
with a vine-covered booth in front, is an old man
kings might envy.

He had a soldier's warittnty deed for one hundred
and sixty acres of land, and he elected to take his
estate at the head of a brook-swept gorge, four-fifths
precipice and rock. In the two miles between his
cabin and the mouth of the gorge, the trail and the
brook change sides sixteen times. When the brook
is at its best, the trail goes under altogether, and
there is no getting up or down the canon. Here,
with a village of bees for companions, the old man
has lived for a dozen years. While the bees are off
at work, he sits at home and weaves, out of the
gnarled stems and roots of manzanita and laurels,
curious baskets, chairs, and brackets, for which he
finds ready market in Los Angeles. He knows every
tree and shrub in the canon, and has a fancy for col-
lecting specimens of all the native woods of the
region. These he shapes into paper-cutters, and
polishes them till they are like satin. He came from
Ohio forty years ago, and has lived in a score of
States. The only spot he likes as well as this gorge

Industries in Southern California 241

is Don Yana, on the Rio Grande River, in Mexico.
Sometimes he hankers to go there and sit under the
shadow of big oaks, where the land slopes down to
the river; but " the bee business," he says, '' is a good
business only for a man who has the gift of continu-
ance ;" and " it 's no use to try to put bees with farms ;
farms want valleys, bees want mountains."

" There are great back-draws to the bee business,
the irregularities of the flowers being chief; some
years there 's no honey in the flowers at all. Some
explain it on one hypothesis and some on another,
and it lasts them to quarrel over."

His phrases astonish you ; also the quiet courtesy
of his manner, so at odds with his backwoodsman's
garb. But presently you learn that he began life as a
lawyer, has been a judge in his time ; and when, to
show his assortment of paper-cutters, he lifts down
the big book they are kept in, and you see that it is
Voltaire's " Philosophical Dictionary," you understand
how his speech has been fashioned. He keeps a diary
of every hive, the genealogy of every swarm.

" No matter what they do, — the least thing, — we
note it right down in the book. That 's the only way
to learn bees," he says.

On the outside wall of the cabin is fastened an
observation hive, with glass sides. Here he sits,
watch in hand, observing and noting ; he times the
bees, in and out, and in each one of their operations.
He watches the queen on her bridal tour in the air;
once the drone bridegroom fell dead on his note-book.

242 Glimpses of California

" I declare I could n't help feeling sort of sorry for
him," said the old man.

In a shanty behind the house is the great honey-
strainer, a marvellous invention, which would drive
bees mad with despair if they could understand it.
Into a wheel, with perforated spokes, is slipped the
comb full of honey, the cells being first opened with a
hot knife. By the swift turning of this wheel, the
honey flies out of the comb, and poui-s through a
cylinder into a can underneath, leaving the comb
whole and uninjured, ready to be put back into the
hive for the patient robbed bees to fill again. The
receiving-can will hold fifteen hundred pounds ; two
men can fill it in a day ; a single comb is so quickly
drained that a bee might leave his hive on his forag-
ing expedition, and before he could get his little load
of honey and return, the comb could be emptied and
put back. It would be vastly interesting to know
what is thought and said in bee-hives about these
mysterious emptyings of combs.

A still more tyrannical circumvention has been
devised, to get extra rations of honey from bees: false
combs, wonderful imitations of the real ones, are made
of wax. Apparently the bees know no difference ; at
any rate, they fill the counterfeit full of real honey.
These artificial combs, carefully handled, will last ten
or twelve years in continual use.

The highest yield his hives had ever given him
was one hundred and eighty pounds a hive.

" That 's a good yield ; at that rate, with three or

Industries in Southern California 243

four hundred hives, I 'd do very well," said the old
man. " But you 're at the mercy of speculators in
honey as well as everything else. I never count on
getting more than four or five cents a pound. They
make more than I do."

The bee has a full year's work in South California :
from March to August inexhaustible forage, and in
all the other months plenty to do, — no month with-
out some blossoms to be found. His time of danger
is when apricots are ripe and lady-bugs fly.

Of apricots, bees will eat till they are either drunk
or stuffed to death ; no one knows which. They do
not live to get home. Oddly enough, they cannot
pierce the skins themselves, but have to wait till the
lady-bug has made a hole for them. It must have
been an accidental thing m the outset, the first bee's
joining a lady-bug at her feast of apricot. The bee,
in his turn, is an irresistible treat to the bee-bird and
lizard, who pounce upon him when he is on the
flower ; and to a stealthy moth, who creeps by night
into hives and kills hundreds.

" Nobody need think the bee business is all play,"
was our old philosopher's last word. "It's just
like everything else in life, and harder than some
things."

The sheep industry is, on the whole, decreasing in
California. In 1876 the wool crop of the entire
State was 28,000 tons ; in 1881, only 21,500. This is
the result, in part, of fluctuations in the price of wool,

244 Glimpses of California

but more of the growing sense of the greater certainty
of increase from agriculture and horticulture.

The cost of keeping a sheep averages only $1.25 a
year. Its wool sells for $1.50, and for each hundred
there will be forty-five lambs, worth seventy-five cents
each. But there have been droughts in California
which have killed over one million sheep in a year ;
there is always, therefore, the risk of losing in one
year the profits of many.

The sheep ranches are usually desolate places : a
great stretch of seemingly bare lands, with a few
fenced corrals, blackened and foulnsraelling ; the
home and out-buildings clustered together in a hol-
low or on a hill-side where there is water ; the less
human the neighborhood the better.

The loneliness of the life is, of itself, a salient
objection to the industry. Of this the great owners
need know nothing ; they can live where they like.
But for the small sheepmen, the shepherds, and, above
all, the herders, it is a terrible life, — how terrible is
shown by the frequency of insanity among herders.
Sometimes, after only a few months of the life, a
herder goes suddenly mad. After learning this fact,
it is no longer possible to see the picturesque side of
the effective groups one so often comes on suddenly
in the wildernesses : sheep peacefully grazing, and
the shepherd lying on the ground watching them, or
the whole flock racing in a solid, fleecy, billowy
scamper up or down a steep hill-side, with the dogs
leaping and barking on all sides at once. One scans

Industries in Southern California 245

the shepherd's face alone, with pitying fear lest he
may be losing his wits.

A shearing at a large sheep ranch is a grand sight.
We had the good fortune to see one at Baldwin's, at
La Puente. Three thousand sheep had been sheared
the day before, and they would shear twenty-five
hundred on this day.

A shed sixty feet long by tweniy-five wide, sides
open; small pens full of sheep surrounding it on
three sides ; eighty men bent over at every possible
angle, eighty sheep being tightly held in every pos-
sible position, eighty shears flashing, glancing, clip-
ping; bright Mexican eyes shining, laughing Mexican
voices jesting. At first it seemed only a confused
scene of phantasmagoria. As our eyes became fa-
miliarized, the confusion disentangled itself, and we
could note the splendid forms of the men and their
marvellous dexterity in using the shears. Less than
five minutes it took from the time a sheep was grasped,
dragged in, thrown down, seized by the shearer's
knees, till it was set free, clean shorn, and its three-
pound fleece tossed on a table outside. A good
shearer shears seventy or eighty sheep in a day;
men of extra dexterity shear a hundred. The
Indians are famous for skill at shearing, and in all
their large villages are organized shearing-bands,
with captains, that go from ranch to ranch in the
shearing-season. There were a half-dozen Indians
lying on the ground outside this shearing-shed at
Puente, looking on wistfully. The Mexicans had

246 Glimpses of California

crowded them out for that day, and they could get
no chance to work.

A pay clerk stood in the centre of the shed with a
leathern wallet full of five-cent pieces. As soon as
a man had sheared his sheep, he ran tx) the clerk,
fleece in hand, threw down the fleece, and received
his five-cent piece. In one comer of the shed was a
barrel of beer, which was retailed at five cents a
glass ; and far too many of the five-cent pieces changed
hands again the next minute at the beer barrreL As
fast as the fleeces were tossed out from the shed,
they were thrown up to a man standing on the top of
the roof. This man flung them into an enormous
bale-sack, swinging wide-mouthed from a derrick ; in
the sack stood another man, who jumped on the wool
to pack it down tight.

As soon as the shearers perceived that their pic-
tures were being drawn by the artist in our party,
they were all agog; by twos and threes they left
their work and crowded around the carriage, peering,
commenting, asking to have their portraits taken,
quizzing those whose features they recognized; it
was like Italy rather than America. One tattered
fellow, whose shoeless feet were tied up in bits of
gunny-bags, was distressed because his trousers were
too short. "Would the gentleman kindly make
them in the drawing a little farther down his legs ?
It was an accident they were so short." All were
ready to pose and stand, even in the most difficult
attitudes, as long as was required. Those who had

I I

14'

Industries in Southern California 249

done so asked, like childi^en, if their names could
not be put in the book ; so I wrote t)iem all down :
"Juan Canero, Juan Rivera, Felipe Ybara, Jos6
Jesus Lopez, and Domingo Garcia." The space
they will fill is a little thing to give ; and there is
a satisfaction in the good faith of printing them,
though the shearers will most assuredly never know
it.

'The faces of the sheep being shorn were piteous ;
not a struggle, not a bleat, the whole of their un-
willingness and terror being written in their upturned
eyes. " As a sheep before her shearers is dumb "
will always have for me a new significance.

The shepherd in charge of the Puente ranch is an
Italian named Gaetano. The porch of his shanty
was wreathed with vines and blossoms, and opened
on a characteristic little garden, half garlic, the other
half pinks and geraniumd. As I sat there looking
out on the scene, he told me of a young man who
had come from Italy to be herder for him, and who
had gone mad and shot himself.

" Three go crazy last year," he said. " Dey come
home, not know noting. You see, never got com-
pany for speak at all."

This young boy grew melancholy almost at once,
was filled with abnormal fears of the coyotes, and
begged for a pistol to shoot them with. " He want
my pistol. I not want give. I say. You little sick ;
you stay home in house ; I send oder man. My wife
she go town buy clothes for baptism one baby got.

250 Glimpses of California

He get pistol in drawer while she gone." They
found him lying dead with his catechism in one
hand and the pistol in the other. As Gaetano fin-
ished the story, a great flock of two thousand shorn
sheep were suddenly let out from one of the corrals.
With a great burst of bleating they dashed off, the
colly running after them. Gaetano seized his whistle
and blew a sharp call on it. The dog halted, looked
back, uncertain for a second ; one more whistle, and
he bounded on.

" He know," said Gaetano. " He take dem two
tousand all right. I like better dat dog as ten men."

On the list of South California's outdoor indus-
tries, grain stands high, and will always continue to
do so. Wheat takes the lead ; but oats, barley, and
corn are of importance. Barley is always a staple,
and averages twenty bushels to the acre.

Oats average from thirty to forty bushels an acre,
and there are records of yields of considerably over
a hundred bushels.

Corn will average forty bushels an acre. On the
Los Angeles River it has grown stalks seventeen
feet high and seven inches round.

The average yield of wheat is from twenty to
twenty-five bushels an acre, about thirty-three per
cent more than in the States on the Atlantic slope.

In grains, as in so many other things, Los Angeles
County is far in advance of the other counties. In
1879 there were in the county 31,500 acres in

Industries in Southern California 251

wheat; in 1881, not less than 100,000; and the
value of the wheat crop for 1882 was reckoned
11,020,000.

The great San Fernando valley, formerly the
property of the San Fernando Mission, is the chief
wheat-producing section of the county. The larger
part of this valley is in two great ranches. One of
them was bought a few years ago for $275,000 ; and
$75,000 paid down, the remainder to be paid in in-
stalments. The next year was a dry year ; crops failed.
The purchaser offered the ranch back again to the
original owners, with his $75,000 thrown in, if they
would release him from his bargain. They refused.
The next winter rains came, the wheat crop was
large, prices were high, and the ranch actually paid
off the entire debt of $200,000 still owing on the
purchase.

From such figures as these, it is easy to see how the
California farmer can afford to look with equanimity
on occasional droughts. Experience has shown that
he can lose crops two years out of five and yet make
a fair average profit for the five years.

The most beautiful ranch in California is said to be
the one about twelve miles west of Santa Barbara,
belonging to Elwood Cooper. Its owner speaks of it
humorously as a little " pocket ranch." In comparison
with the great ranches whose acres are counted by tens
of thousands, it is small, being only two thousand
acres in extent; but in any other part of the world
except California, it would be thought a wild jest to

252 Glimpses of California

speak of an estate of two thousand acres as a small
one.

Ten years ago this ranch was a bare, desolate sheep
ranch, — not a tree on it, excepting the oaks and syca-
mores in the cafions. To-day it has twelve hundred
acres under high cultivation ; and driving from field
to field, orchard to orchard, one drives, if he sees the
whole of the ranch, over eleven miles of good made
road. There are three hundred acres in wheat, one
hundred and seventy in barley; thirty-five himdred
walnut-trees, twelve thousand almond, five thousand
olive, two thousand fig and domestic fruit trees, and
one hundred and fifty thousand eucalyptus-trees, rep-
resenting twenty-four varieties ; one thousand grape-
vines ; a few orange, lemon, and lime trees. There are
on the ranch one hundred head of cattle, fifty horses,
and fifteen hundred sheep.

These are mere bald figures, wonderful enough as
statistics of what may be done in ten years' time on
South California soil, but totally inadequate even to
suggest the beauty of the place.

The first relief to the monotony of the arrow-straight
road which it pleased an impatient, inartistic man to
make westward from Santa Barbara, is the sight of
high, dark walls of eucalyptus-trees on either side of
the road. A shaded avenue, three quarters of a mile
long, of these represents the frontages of Mr. Cooper's
estate. Turning to the right, through a break in this
wall, is a road, with dense eucalyptus woods on the left
and an almond orchard on the right. It winds and

Industries in Southern California 253

turns past knolls of walnut grove, long lines of olive
orchard, and right-angled walls of eucalyptus-trees
shutting in wheat-fields. By curves and bends and
sharp turns, all the time with new views, and
new colors from changes of crop, with exquisite
glimpses of the sea shot through here and there, it
finally, at the end of a mile, reaches the brink of an
oak-canopied canon. In the mouth of this canon
stands the house, fronting south on a sunny meadow
and garden space, walled in on three sides by euca-
lyptus-trees.

To describe the oak kingdom of this cafion would
be to begin far back of all known kingdoms of the
country. The branches are a network of rafters up-
holding roof canopies of boughs and leaves so solid,
that the sun's rays pierce them only brokenly, mak-
ing on the ground a dancing carpet of brown and
gold flecks even in winter, and in summer a shade
lighted only by starry glints.

Farther up the cafion are sycamores, no less stately
than the oaks, their limbs gnarled and twisted as if
they had won their places by splendid wrestle.

These oak-and-sycamore-filled cafions are the most
beautiful of the South California cafions ; though the
soft, chaparral-walled cafions would, in some lights,
press them hard for supremacy of place. Nobody
will ever, by pencil or brush or pen, fairly render the
beauty of the mysterious, undefined, undefinable
chaparral. Matted, tangled, twisted, piled, tufted, —
everything is chaparral. All botany may be ex-

254 Glimpses of California

hausted in describing it in one place, and it will not
avail you in another. But in all places, and made up
of whatever hundreds of shrubs it may be, it is the
most exquisite carpet surface that Nature has to show
for mountain fronts or cafion sides. Not a color that
it does not take ; not a bloom that it cannot rival ; a
bank of cloud cannot be softer, or a bed of flowers
more varied of hue. Some day, between 1900 and
2000, when South California is at leisure and has
native artists, she will have an ai*tist of cafions,
whose life and love and work will be spent in pictur-
ing them, — the royal oak canopies ; the herculean
sycamores; the chameleon, velvety chaparral; and
the wild, throe-built, water-quarried rock gorges,
with their myriad ferns and flowers.

At tlie head of Mr. Cooper's cafion are broken and
jutting sandstone walls, over "three hundred feet high,
draped with mosses and ferns and all manner of
vines. I saw the dainty thalictrum, with its clover-
like leaves, standing in thickets there, fresh and
green, its blossoms nearly out on the first day of Feb-
ruary. Looking down from these heights over the
whole of the ranch, one sees for the first time the
completeness of its beauty. The eucalyptus belts
have been planted in every instance solely with a
view to utility, — either as wind-breaks to keep off*
known special wind-currents from orchard or grain-
field, or to make use of gorge sides too steep for
other cultivation. Yet, had they been planted with
sole reference to landscape effects, they could not

Industries in Southern California 255

better have fallen into place. Even out to the very
ocean edge the groves run, their purples and greens
melting into the purples and greens of the sea vrhen
it is dark and when it is sunny blue, — making har-
monious lines of color, leading up from it to the soft
grays of the olive and the bright greens of the wal-
nut orchards and wheat-fields. When the almond-
trees are in bloom, the eucalyptus belts are perhaps
most superb of all, with their dark speai's and plumes
waving above and around the white and rosy acres.

The leading industry of this ranch is to be the
making of olive oil. Already its oil is known and
sought; and to taste it is a revelation to palates
accustomed to the compounds of rancid cocoanut and
cotton-seed with which the markets are full. The
olive industry will no doubt ultimately be one of the
great industries of the whole country : vast tracts of
land which are not suitable or do not command water
enough for orange, grape, or grain culture, affording
ample support to the thrifty and unexacting olive.
The hill-slopes around San Diego, and along the
coast line for forty or fifty miles up, will no doubt
one day be as thickly planted with olives as is the
Mediterranean shore. Italy's olive crop is worth
thirty million dollars annually, and California has
as much land suited to the olive as Italy has.

The tree is propagated from cuttings, begins to
bear the fourth year, and is in full bearing by the
tenth or twelfth. One hundred and ten can be
planted to an acre. Their endurance is enormous.

256 Glimpses of California

Some of the orchards planted by the friars at the
missions over a hundred years ago are still bearing,
spite of scores of years of neglect; and there are
records of trees in Nice haying borne for several
centuries.

The process of oil-making is an interesting spec-
tacle, under Mr. Cooper's oak-trees. The olives are
first dried in trays with slat bottoms, tiers upon tiers
of these being piled in a kiln over a furnace fire.
Then they are ground between stone rollers, worked
by huge wheels turned by horse-power. The oil,
thus pressed out, is poured into huge butts or tanks.
Here it has to stand and settle three or four months.
There are faucets at different levels in these butts,
so as to draw off different, layers of oil. After it has
settled sufficiently, it is filtered through six layers of
cotton batting, then through one of French paper,
before it is bottled. It is then of a delicate straw
color, with a slight greenish tint, — not at all of the
golden yellow of the ordinary market article. That
golden yellow and the thickening in cold are sure
proofs of the presence of cotton-seed in oil, — the
pure oil remaining limpid in a cold which will turn
the adulterated oils white and thick. It is estimated
that an acre of olives in full bearing will pay fifteen
hundred dollars a year if pickled, and two thousand
dollars a year made into oil.

In observing the industries of South California
and studying their history, one never escapes from
an undercurrent of wonder that there should be any

Industries in Southern California 257

industries or industry there. No winter to be pre-
pared for; no fixed time at which anything must
be done or not done at all ; the air sunny, balmy,
dreamy, seductive, making the mere being alive in
it a pleasure ; all sorts of fruits and grains growing
a-riot, and taking care of themselves, — it is easy to
understand the character, or, to speak more accu-
rately, the lack of character, of the old Mexican and
Spanish Californians.

There was a charm in it, however. Simply out of
sunshine, there had distilled in them an Orientalism
as fine in its way as that made in the East by gen-
erations of prophets, crusaders, and poets. With no
more curiosity than was embodied in " Who knows ? "
— with no thought or purpose for a future more de-
fined than " Some other time; not to-day," — without
greeds, and with the unlimited generosities of chil-
dren, — no wonder that to them the restless, inquisi-
tive, insatiable, close-reckoning Yankee seemed the
most intolerable of all conquerors to whom they
could surrender. One can fancy them shuddering,
even in heaven, as they look down to-day on his
colonies, his railroads, his crops, — their whole land
humming and buzzing with his industries.

One questions also whether, as the generations

move on, the atmospheres of life in the sunny empire

they lost will not revert more and more to their type,

and be less and less of the type they so disliked.

Unto the third and fourth generation, perhaps, pulses

may keep up the tireless Yankee beat ; but sooner or

258 Glimpses of California

later there is certain to come a slacking, a toning-
down, and a readjusting of standards and habits by
a scale in which money and work will not be the
highest values. This is '^ as sure as that the sun
shines," for it is the sun that will bring it about.

CHANCE DAYS IN OREGON

> !

i":

llr
I

nil

i;'

CHANCE DAYS IN OREGON

The best things in life seem always snatched on
chances. The longer one lives and looks back, the
more he realizes this, and the harder he finds it to
"make option which of two," in the perpetually
recurring cases when " there 's not enough for this
and that," and he must choose which he will do or
take. Chancing right in a decision, and seeing
cleariy what a blunder any other decision would
have been, only makes the next such decision harder,
and contributes to increased vacillation of purpose
and infirmity of will, until one comes to have seri-
ous doubts whether there be not a truer philosophy
in the " toss up " test than in any other method.
"Heads we go, tails we stay," will prove right as
many times out of ten as the most painstaking pros
and cons, weighing, consulting, and slow deciding.

It was not exactly by "heads and tails " that we
won our glimpse of Oregon; but it came so nearly
to the same thing that our recollections of the
journey are still mingled with that sort of exultant
sense of delight with which the human mind always
regards a purely fortuitous possession.

262 Glimpses of California

Three days and two nights on the Pacific Ocean is
a rouDd price to pay for a thing, even for Oregon,
with the Columbia liiver thrown in. There is not
80 misnamed a piece of water on the globe as the
Pacific Ocean, nor so unexplainable a delusion aa
the almost universal impression that it is smooth
Bailing tliere. It is British Channel and North Sea
and off the Hebrides combined, — as many different
twists and chops and swells as there are waves.
People who have crossed the Atlantic again and
again without so much as a qualm are desperately ill
between San Francisco and Portland. There is but
one comparison for the motion; it is as if one's
stomach were being treated as double teeth are han-
dled when country doctors are forced to officiate as
dentists, and know no better way to get a four-
pronged tooth out of its socket than to turn it round
and round till it is torn loose.

Three days and two nights ! I spent no incon-
siderable portion of the time in speculations as to
Monsieur Antoine Crozat'a probable reasons for giv-
ing back to King Louis his magnificent grant of
Pacific coast country. He kept it five years, I
believe. In that time he probably voyaged up and
down its shores thoroughly. Having been an adven-
turous trader in the Indies, be must have been well
wonted to seas; and being worth forty millions of
livres, he could afford to make himself as comfort-
able in the matter of a ship as was possible a century
and a half ago. His grant was a princely domain,

Chance Days in Oregon 263

an empire five times larger than France itself. What
could he have been thinking of, to hand it back to
King Louis like a worthless bauble of which he had
grown tired ? Nothing but the terrors of sea-sickness
can explain it. If he could have foreseen the steam-
engine, and have had a vision of it flying on iron
roads across continents and mountains, how differ-
ently would he have conducted ! The heirs of Mon-
sieur Antoine, if any such there be to-day, must
chafe when they read the terms of our Louisiana
Purchase.

Three days and two nights — from Thursday
morning till Saturday afternoon — between San
Francisco and the mouth of the Columbia, and then
we had to lie at Astoria the greater part of Sunday
night before the tide would let us go on up the
river. It was not waste time, however. Astoria is
a place curious to behold. Seen from the water, it
seems a tidy little white town nestled on the shore,
and well topped off by wooded hills. Landing, one
finds that it must be ranked as amphibious, being
literally half on land and half on water. From
Astoria proper — the old Astoria, which Mr. Astor
founded, and Washington Irving described — up to
the new town, or upper Astoria, is a mile and a
half, two-thirds bridges and piers. Long wooden
wharves, more streets than wharves, resting on hun-
dreds of piles, are built out to deep water. They
fairly fringe the shore; and the street nearest the
water is little more than a succession of bridges

264 Glimpses of California

from wharf to wharf. Frequent bays and inlets
make up, leaving unsightly muddy wastes when the
tide goes out. To see family washing hung out on
lines over these tidal flats, and the family infants
drawing their go-carts in the mud below, was a droll
sight. At least every other building on these
strange wharf streets is a salmon cannery, and acres
of the wharf surfaces were covered with salmon nets
spread out to dry. The streets were crowded with
wild-looking men, sailor-like, and yet not sailor like,
all wearing india-rubber boots reaching far above
the knee with queer wing-like flaps projecting all
around at top. These were the fishers of salmon,
two thousand of them, Russians, Finns, Germans,
Italians, — "every kind on the earth," an old res-
taurant-keeper said, in speaking of them; "every
kind on the earth, they pour in here, for four months,
from May to September. They're a wild set; clear
out with the salmon, 'n' don't mind any more 'n the
fish do what they leave behind 'em."

All day long they kill time in the saloons. The
nights they spend on the water, flinging and trolling
and drawing in their nets, which often burst with
the weight of the captured salmon. It is a strange
life, and one sure to foster a man's worst traits
rather than his best ones. The fishermen who have
homes and families, and are loyal to them, industri-
ous and thrifty, are the exception.

The site of Mr. Astor's original fort is now the
terraced yard of a spruce new house on the corner

Chance Days in Oregon 265

of one of the pleasantest streets in the old town.
These streets are little more than narrow terraces
rising one above the other on jutting and jagged
levels of the river-bank. They command superb off-
looks across and up and down the majestic river,
which is here far more a bay than a river. The
Astoria people must be strangely indifferent to these
views ; for the majority of the finest houses face away
from the water, looking straight into the rough
wooded hillside.

Uncouth and quaint vehicles are perpetually plying
between the old and the new towns ; they jolt along
fast over the narrow wooden roads, and the foot-
passengers, who have no other place to walk, are per-
petually scrambling from under the horses' heels.
It is a unique highway: pebbly beaches, marshes,
and salt ponds, alder-grown cliffs, hemlock and
spruce copses on its inland side; on the water-side,
bustling wharves, canneries, fishermen's boarding-
houses, great spaces filled in with bare piles waiting
to be floored; at every turn shore and sea seem to
change sides, and clumps of brakes, fresh-hewn
stumps, maple and madrona trees, shift places with
canneries and wharves; the sea swashes under the
planks of the road at one minute, and the next is
an eighth of a mile away, at the end of a close-built
lane. Even in the thickest settled business part of
the town, blocks of water alternate with blocks of
brick and stone.

The statistics of the salmon-canning business

266 Glimpses of California

almost pass belief. In 1881 six hundred thousand
cases of canned salmon were shipped from Astoria.
We ourselves saw seventy-five hundred cases put
on board one steamer. There were forty eight-
pound cans in each case; it took five hours' steady
work, of forty "long-shore men," to load them.
These long-shore men are another shifting and tur-
bulent element in the populations of the river towns.
They work day and night, get big wages, go from
place to place, and spend money recklessly; a sort
of commercial Bohemian, diflBcult to handle and
often dangerous. They sometimes elect to take
fifty cents an hour and all the beer they can drink,
rather than a dollar an hour and no beer. At the
time we saw them, they were on beer wages. The
foaming beer casks stood at short intervals along the
wharf, — a pitcher, pail, and mug at each cask.
The scene was a lively one : four cases loaded at a
time on each truck, run swiftly to the wharf edge,
and slid down the hold; trucks rattling, turning
sharp corners ; men laughing, wheeling to right and
left of each other, tossing off mugs of beer, wiping
their mouths with their hands, and flinging the
drops in the air with jests, — one half forgave them
for taking part wages in the beer, it made it so
much merrier.

On Sunday morning we waked up to find ourselves
at sea in the Columbia River. A good part of Ore-
gon and Washington Territory seemed also to be at
sea there. When a river of the size of the Columbia

Chance Days in Oregon 267

gets thirty feet above low-water mark, towns and
townships go to sea unexpectedly. All the way up
the Columbia to the Willamette, and down the Wil-
lamette to Portland, we sailed in and on a freshet,
and saw at once more and less of the country than
could be seen at any other time. At the town of
Kalama, facetiously announced as " the water termi-
nus of the Northern Pacific Railroad," the hotel, the
railroad station, and its warehouses were entirely
surrounded by water, and we sailed, in seemingly
deep water, directly over the wharf where landings
were usually made. At other towns on the way we
ran well up into the fields, and landed passengers or
freight on stray sand-spits, or hillocks, from which
they could get off again on the other side by small
boats. We passed scores of deserted houses, their
windows open, the water swashing over their door-
sills ; gardens with only tops of bushes in sight, one
with red roses swaying back and forth, limp and
helpless on the tide. It seemed strange that men
would build houses and make farms in a place
where they are each year liable to be driven out by
such freshets. When I expressed this wonder, an
Oregonian replied lightly, "Oh, the river always
gives them plenty of time. They 've all got boats,
and they wait till the last minute always, hoping
the water '11 go down. " — "But it must be unwhole-
some to the last degree to live on such overflowed
lands. When the water recedes, they must get
fevers." — " Oh, they get used to it. After they 've

268 Glimpses of California

taken about a barrel of quinine, they're pretty well
acclimated/'

Other inhabitants of the country asserted roundly
that no fevers followed these freshets; that the
tnidc-winds swept away all malarial influences; that
the water did no injury whatever to the farms, — on
the contrary, made the crops better; and that these
farmers along the river bottoms "couldn't be hired
to live anywhere else in Oregon."

The higher shore lines were wooded almost with-
out a break ; only at long intervals an oasis of clear-
ing, high up, an emerald spot of barley or wheat,
and a tiny farm-house. These were said to be
usually lumbermen's homes; it was warmer up there
than in the bottom, and crops thrived. In the not
far-off day when these kingdoms of forests are over-
thrown, and the Columbia runs unshaded to the sea,
these hill shores will be one vast granary.

The city of Portland is on the Willamette River,
fourteen miles south of the junction of that river
with the Columbia. Seen from its water approach,
Portland is a picturesque city, with a near surround-
ing of hills wooded with pines and firs, that make a
superb sky-line setting to the town and to the five
grand snow-peaks of which clear days give a sight.
These dark forests and spear-top fringes are a more
distinctive feature in the beauty of Portland's site
than even its fine waters and islands. It is to be
hoped that the Portland people will appreciate their
value, and never let their near hills be shorn of trees.

Chance Days in Oregon 269

Not one tree more should be cut. Already there are
breaks in the forest horizons, which mar the picture
greatly; and it would take but a few days of ruthless
woodchoppers' work to rob the city forever of its
backgrounds, turning them into unsightly barrens.
The city is on both sides of the river, and is called
East and West Portland. With the usual perversity
in such cases, the higher ground and the sunny
eastern frontage belong to the less popular part of
the city, the west town having most of the business
and all of the fine houses. Yet in times of freshet
its lower streets are always under water; and the set-
ting-up of back-water into drains, cellars, and empty
lots is a yearly source of much illness. When we
arrived, two of the principal hotels were surrounded
by water; from one of them there was no going out
or coming in except by planks laid on trestle-work
in the piazzas, and the air in the lower part of the
town was foul with bad smells from the stagnant
water.

Portland is only thirty years old, and its popula-
tion is not over twenty-five thousand ; yet it is said
to have more wealth per head than any other city in
the United States except New Haven. Wheat and
lumber and salmon have made it rich. Oregon
wheat brings such prices in England that ships can
afford to cross the ocean to get it; and last year one
hundred and thirty-four vessels sailed out of Portland
harbor, loaded solely with wheat or flour.

The city reminds one strongly of some of the rural

270 Glimpses of California

towns in New England. The houses are unpreten-
tious, wooden, either white or of light colors, and
uniformly surrounded by pleasant grounds, in which
trees, shrubs, and flowers grow freely, without any
attempt at formal or decorative culture. One of the
most delightful things about the town is its sur-
rounding of wild and wooded country. In an hour,
driving up on the hills to the west, one finds himself
in wildernesses of woods: spruce, maple, cedar, and
pine; dogwood, wild syringa, honeysuckle, ferns,
and brakes fitting in for undergrowth; and below
all, white clover matting the ground. By the road-
sides are Linnaea, red clover, yairow. May-weed, and
dandelion, looking to New England eyes strangely
familiar and unfamiliar at once. Never in New
England woods and roadsides do they have such a
luxurious diet of water and rich soil, and such com-
fortable warm winters. The white clover especially
has an air of spendthrifty indulgence about it which
is delicious. It riots through the woods, even in
their densest, darkest depths, making luxuriant
pasturage where one would least look for it. On
these wooded heights are scores of dairy farms,
which have no clearings except of the space needful
for the house and outbuildings. The cows, each
with a bell at her neck, go roaming and browsing all
day in the forests. Out of thickets scarcely penetra-
ble to the eye come everywhere along the road the
contented notes of these bells' slow tinkling at the
cows' leisure. The milk, cream, and butter from

Chance Days in Oregon 271

these dairy fanns are of the excellent quality to be
expected, and we wondered at not seeing "white
clover butter" advertised as well as "white clover
honey." Land in these wooded wilds brings from
forty to eighty dollars an acre ; cleared, it is admir-
able farm land. Here and there we saw orchards of
cherry and apple trees, which were loaded with
fruit; the cherry-trees so full that they showed red
at a distance.

The alternation of these farms with long tracts of
forest, where spruces and pines stand a hundred and
fifty feet high, and myriads of wild things have
grown in generations of tangle, gives to the country
around Portland a charm and flavor peculiarly its
own; even into the city itself extends something of
the same charm of contrast and antithesis ; meander-
ing footpaths, or narrow plank sidewalks with grassy
rims, running within stone's-throw of solid brick
blocks and business thoroughfares. One of the
most interesting places in the town is the Bureau of
Immigration of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In
the centre of the room stands a tall case, made of the
native Oregon woods. It journeyed to the Paris and
the Philadelphia Expositions, but nowhere can it
have given eloquent mute answer to so many ques-
tions as it does in its present place. It now holds
jars of all the grains raised in Oregon and Wash-
ington; also sheaves of superb stalks of the same
grains, arranged in circles, — wheat six feet high,
oats ten, red clover over six, and timothy grass

272 Glimpses of California

eight. To see Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Irish,
come in, stand wonderingly before this case, and
then begin to ask their jargon of questions, was
an experience which did more in an hour to make
one realize what the present tide of immigration to
the New Northwest really is than reading of statistics
could do in a year. These immig^nts are pouring
in, it is estimated, at the rate of at least a hundred
and fifty a day, — one hundred by way of San Fran-
cisco and Portland, twenty-five by the Puget Sound
ports, and another twenty-five overland by wagons;
no two with the same aim, no two alike in quality
or capacity. To listen to their inquiries and their
narratives, to give them advice and help, requires
almost preternatural patience and sagacity. It
might be doubted, perhaps, whether this requisite
combination could be found in an American; cer-
tainly no one of any nationality could fill the oflBce
better than it is filled by the tireless Norwegian who
occupies the post at present. It was touching to see
the brightened faces of his countrymen, as their
broken English was answered by him in the familiar
words of their own tongue. He could tell well
which parts of the new country would best suit the
Hardanger men, and the men from Eide. It must
have been hard for them to believe his statements,
even when indorsed by the home speech. To the
ordinary Scandinavian peasant, accustomed to meas-
uring cultivable ground by hand-breadths, and mak-
iiig gardens in pockety in rocks, tales of hundreds of

Chance Days in Oregon 273

unbroken miles of wheat country, where crops aver-
age from thirty-five to forty-five bushels an acre, must
sound incredible; and spite of their faith in their
countryman, they are no doubt surprised when their
first harvest in the Willamette or Umpqua valley
proves that his statements were under, rather than
over, the truth.

The Columbia River steamers set off from Port-
land at dawn, or thereabouts. Wise travellers go on
board the night before, and their first morning con-
sciousness is a wonder at finding themselves afloat,
— afloat on a sea; for it hardly seems like river
voyaging when shores are miles apart, and, in many
broad vistas, water is all that can be seen. These
vistas, in times of high water, when the Columbia
may be said to be fairly "seas over," are grand.
Thiy shine and flicker for miles, right and left with
green feathery fringes of tree-tops, and queer brown
stippled points and ridges, which are house gables
and roof-trees, not quite gone under. One almost
forgets, in the interest of the spectacle, what misery
it means to the owners of the gables and roof-trees.

At Washougal Landing, on the morning when we
went up the river, all that was to be seen of the
warehouse on the wharf at which we should have
made landing was the narrow ridge-line of its roof;
and this was at least a third of a mile out from
shore. The boat stopped, and the passengers were
rowed out in boats and canoes, steering around among
tree-tops and houses as best they might.

274 Glimpses of California

The true shore-line of the river we never once saw ;
1but it cannot be so beautiful as was the freshet's
shore of upper banks and terraces, — dark forests at
top, shifting shades of blue in every rift between the
hills, iridescent rainbow colors on the slopes, and
gray clouds, white-edged, piled up in masses above
them, all floating apace with us, and changing tone
and tint oftener than we changed course.

As we approached the Cascade Mountains, the
scenery grew grander with every mile. The river
cuts through this range in a winding cafion, whose
sides for a space of four or five miles are from three
to four thousand feet high. But the charm of this
pass is not so much in the height and grandeur as in
the beauty of its walls. They vary in color and
angle, and light and shadow, each second, — perpen-
dicular rock fronts, mossy brown ; shelves of velvety
greenness and ledges of glistening red or black
stone thrown across; great basaltic columns fluted
as by a chisel; jutting tables of rock carpeted with
yellow and brown lichen ; turrets standing out with
firs growing on them; bosky points of cottonwood-
trees; yellow and white blossoms and curtains of
ferns, waving out, hanging over; and towering
above all these, peaks and summits wrapped in
fleecy clouds. Looking ahead, we could see some-
times only castellated mountain lines, meeting across
the river, like walls; as we advanced they retreated,
and opened with new vistas at each opening. Shin-
ing threads of water spun down in the highest places,

Chance Days in Oregon 275

sometimes falling sheer to the river, sometimes sink-
ing out of sight in forest depths midway down, like
the famed fosses of the Norway fjords. Long sky-
lines of pines and firs, which we knew to be from one
hundred to three hundred feet tall, looked in the
aerial perspective no more than a mossy border along
the wall. A little girl, looking up at them, gave by
one artless exclamation a true idea of this effect.
" Oh," she cried, " they look just as if you could pick
a little bunch of them." At intervals along the
right-hand shore were to be seen the white-tented
encampments of the Chinese laborers on the road
which the Northern Pacific Railroad Company is
building to link St. Paul with Puget Sound. A force
of three thousand Chinamen and two thousand
whites is at work on this river division, and the road
is being pushed forward with great rapidity. The
track looked in places as if it were not one inch out
of the water, though it was twenty feet; and tunnels
which were a hundred and thirty feet high looked
only like oven mouths. It has been a hard road to
build, costing in some parts sixty-five thousand
dollars a mile. One spot was pointed out to us
where twenty tons of powder had been put in, in
seven drifts, and one hundred and forty cubic yards
of rock and soil blown at one blast into the river.
It is an odd thing that huge blasts like this make
little noise, only a slight puff; whereas small blasts
make the hills ring and echo with their racket.
Between the lower cascades and the upper cascades

276 Glimpses of California

is a portage of six miles, past fierce waters, in which
a boat could scarcely live. Here we took cars; they
were over-full, and we felt ourselves much aggrieved
at being obliged to make the short journey standing
on one of the crowded platforms. It proved to be
only another instance of the good things caught on
chances. Next me stood an old couple, the man's
neck so burnt and wrinkled it looked like fiery red
alligator's skin; his clothes, evidently his best,
donned for a journey, were of a fashion so long gone
by that they had a quaint dignity. The woman
wore a checked calico sunbonnet, and a green merino
gown of as quaint a fashion as her husband's coat.
With them was a veritable Leather Stocking, — an
old farmer, whose flannel shirt, tied loosely at the
throat with a bit of twine, fell open, and showed a
broad hairy breast of which a gladiator might have
been proud.

The cars jolted heavily, making it hard to keep
one's footing; and the old man came near being
shaken off the step. Recovering himself, he said,
laughing, to his friend, —

"Anyhow, it 's easier 'n a buckin' Cayuse horse."

"Yes," assented the other. "'T ain't much like
'49, is it?"

"Were you here in '49?" I asked eagerly.

"'49!" he repeated scornfully. "I was here in
'47. I was seven months comin' across from Iowa
to Oregon City in an ox team; an' we're livin' on that
same section we took up then; an' I reckon there

Chance Days in Oregon 277

hain't nobody got a lien on to it yet. We 've raised
nine children, an' the youngest on 'em 's twenty-one.
My woman 's been sick for two or three years ; this is
the first time I 've got her out. Thought we 'd go
down to Columbus, an' get a little pleasure, if we
can. We used to come up to this portage in boats,
an' then pack everjrthing on horses an' ride across."

"We wore buckskin clo'es in those days," inter-
rupted Leather Stocking, "and spurs with bells;
need n't do more 'n jingle the bells, 'n' the horse 'd
start. I 'd like to see them times back agen, too.
I vow I 'm put to 't now to know where to go.
This civilyzation," with an indescribably sarcastic
emphasis on the third syllable, " is too much for me.
1 don't want to live where I can't go out 'n' kill a
deer before breakfast any momin' 1 take a notion to."

" Were there many Indians here in those days ? " I
asked.

"Many Injuns?" he retorted; "why, 'twas all
Injims. All this country 'long here was jest full
on 'em."

"How did you find them?"

"Jest 's civil 's any people in the world; never
had no trouble with 'em. Nobody never did have
any thet treated 'em fair. I tell ye, it 's jest with
them 's 't is with cattle. Now there '11 be one man
raise cattle, an' be real mean with 'em; an' they'll
all hook, an' kick, an' break fences, an' run away.
An' there '11 be another, an' his cattle '11 all be
kind, an' come ter yer when you call 'em. I don't

278 Glimpses of California

never want to know any thin' more about a man than
the way his stock acts. I hain't got a critter that
won't come up by its name an' lick my hand. An'
it 's jest so with folks. Ef a man 's mean to you,
yer goin' to be mean to him, every time. The great
thing with Injuns is, never to tell 'em a yam. If
yer deceive 'em once, they won't ever trust yer
again, 's long 's yer live, an' you can't trust them
either. Oh, I know Injuns, I tell you. I 've been
among 'em here more 'n thirty year, an' I never had
the first trouble yet. There 's been troubles, but I
wa'n't in 'em. It 's been the white people's fault
every time."

" Did you ever know Chief Joseph ? " I asked.

"What, old Jo! You bet I knew him. He 's an
A No. 1 Injun, he is. He 's real honorable. Why,
I got lost once, an' I came right on his camp before I
knowed it, an' the Injuns they grabbed me; 'twas
night, 'n' I was kind o' creepin' along cautious, an'
the first thing I knew there was an Injun had me on
each side, an' they jest marched me up to Jo's tent,
to know >what they should do with me. I wa'n't a
mite afraid; I jest looked him right square in the
eye. That 's another thing with Injuns ; you ' ve got
to look 'em in the eye, or they won't trust ye.
Well, Jo, he took up a torch, a pine knot he had
bumin', and he held it close't up to my face, and
looked me up an' down, an' down an' up; an' I
never flinched; I jest looked him up an' down 's
good 's he did me; 'n' then he set the knot down,

Chance Days in Oregon 279

'n' told the men it was all right, — I was *tum turn; '
that meant 1 was good heart; 'n' they gave me all
I could eat, 'n' a guide to show me my way, next
day, 'n' I could n't make Jo nor any of 'em take one
cent. I had a kind o' comforter o' red yarn, I wore
round my neck; an' at last I got Jo to take that,
jest as a kind o' momento."

The old man was greatly indignant to hear that
Chief Joseph was in Indian Territory. He had been
out of the State at the time of the Nez Perc^ war,
and had not heard of Joseph's fate.

" Well, that was a dirty mean trick 1 " he ex-
claimed, — "a dirty mean trick ! I don't care who
done it."

Then he told me of another Indian chief he had
known well, — " Ercutch" by name. This chief was
always a warm friend of the whites ; again and again
he had warned them of danger from hostile Indians.
"Why, when he died, there wa'n't a white woman
in all this country that did n't mourn 's if she 'd lost
a friend; they felt safe 's long 's he was round.
When he knew he was dyin', he jest bade all his
friends good-by. Said he, ' Good-by 1 I 'm goin'
to the Great Spirit;' an' then he named over each
friend he had, Injuns an' whites, each one by name,
and said good-by after each name."

It was a strange half -hour, rocking and jolting on
this crowded car platform, the splendid tossing and
foaming river with its rocks and islands on one hand,
high cliffs and fir forests on the other; these three

28o Glimpses of California

weather-beaten, eager, aged faces by my side, with
their shrewd old voices telling such reminiscences,
and rising shrill above the din of the cars.

From the upper cascades to the Dalles, by boat
again; a splendid forty miles' run, through the
mountain-pass, its walls now gradually lowering,
and, on the Washington Territory side of the river,
terraces and slopes of cleared lands and occasional
settlements. Great numbers of drift-logs passed us
here, coming down apace, from the rush of the
Dalles above. Every now and then one would get
tangled in the bushes and roots on the shore, swing
in, and lodge tight to await the next freshet.

The "log" of one of these driftwood voyages
would be interesting ; a tree trunk may be ten years
getting down to the sea, or it may swirl down in a
week. It is one of the businesses along the river to
catch them, and pull them in to shore, and much
money is made at it. One lucky fisher of logs, on
the Snake River Fork, oKce drew ashore six hundred
cords in a single year. Sometimes a whole boom
gets loose from its moorings, and comes down stream,
without breaking up. This is a godsend to anybody
who can head it off and tow it in shore ; for by the
law of the river he is entitled to one-half the value
of the logs.

At the Dalles is another short portage of twelve
miles, past a portion of the river which, though less
grand than its plunge through the Cascade Moun-
tains, is far more unique and wonderful. The

Chance Days in Oregon 281

waters here are stripped and shred into countless
zigzagging torrents, boiling along through labyrinths
of black lava rocks and slabs. There is nothing in
all Nature so gloomy, so weird, as volcanic slag; and
the piles, ridges, walls, palisades of it thrown up at
this point look like the roof- trees, chimneys, turrets
of a half-engulfed Pandemonium. Dark slaty and
gray tints spread over the whole shore, also ; it is all
volcanic matter, oozed or boiled over, and hardened
into rigid shapes of death and destruction. The
place is terrible to see. Fitting in well with the
desolateness of the region was a group of half-naked
Indians crouching on the rocks, gaunt and wretched,
fishing for salmon; the hollows in the rocks about
them filled with the bright vermilion-colored salmon
spawn, spread out to dry. The twilight was nearly
over as we sped by, and the deepening darkness
added momently to the gloom of the scene.

At Celilo, just above the Dalles, we took boat
again for Umatilla, one hundred miles farther up the
river.

Next morning we were still among lava beds : on
the Washington Territory side, low, rolling shores,
or slanting slopes with terraces, and tufty brown
surfaces broken by ridges and points of the black
slag; on the Oregon side, high brown cliffs mottled
with red and yellow lichens, and great beaches and
dunes of sand, which had blown into windrows and
curving hillock lines as on the sea-shore. This sand
is a terrible enemy for a railroad to fight. In a few

282 Glimpses of California

hours, sometimes, rods of the track are buried by it
as deep as by snow in the fiercest winter storms.

The first picture I saw from my state-room win-
dows, this morning, was an Indian standing on a
narrow plank shelf that was let down by ropes over
a perpendicular rock front, some fifty feet high.
There he stood, as composed as if he were on terra
firma^ bending over towards the water, and flinging
in his salmon net. On the rocks above him sat the
women of his family, spreading the salmon to dry.
We were within so short a distance of the banks
that friendly smiles could be distinctly seen; and
one of the younger squaws, laughing back at the
lookers-on on deck, picked up a salmon, and waving
it in her right hand, ran swiftly along towards an
outjutting point. She was a gay creature, with
scarlet fringed leggings, a pale green blanket, and
on her head a twisted handkerchief of a fine old
Diirer red. As she poised herself, and braced back-
wards to throw the salmon on deck, she was a superb
figure against the sky; she did not throw straight,
and the fish fell a few inches short of reaching the
boat. As it struck the water she made a petulant
little gesture of disappointment, like a child, threw
up her hands, turned, and ran back to her work.

At Umatilla, being forced again to " make option
which of two," we reluctantly turned back, leaving
the beautiful Walla Walla region unvisited, for the
sake of seeing Puget Sound. The Walla Walla
region is said to be the finest stretch of wheat

Chance Days in Oregon 283

country in the world. Lava slag, when decomposed,
makes the richest of soil, — deep and seemingly of
inexhaustible fertility. A failure of harvests is said
never to have been known in that country ; the aver-
age yield of wheat is thirty-five to forty bushels
an acre, and oats have yielded a hundred bushels.
Apples and peaches thrive, and are of a superior
quality. The country is well watered, and has fine
rolling plateaus from fifteen hundred to three thou-
sand feet high, giving a climate neither too cold in
winter nor too hot in summer, and of a bracing
quality not found nearer the sea. Hearing all the
unquestionable tributes to the beauty and value of
this Walla Walla region, I could not but recall some
of Chief Joseph's pleas that a small share of it should
be left in the possession of those who once owned
it all.

From our pilot, on the way down, I heard an
Indian story, too touching to be forgotten, though
too long to tell here except in briefest outline. As
we were passing a little village, half under water,
he exclaimed, looking earnestly at a small building
to whose window-sills the water nearly reached:
" Well, I declare, Lucy 's been driven out of her
house this time. I was wondering why I did n't see
her handkerchief a-waving. She always waves to
me when I go by." Then he told me Lucy's story.

She was a California Indian, probably of the
Tulares, and migrated to Oregon with her family
thirty years ago. She was then a young girl, and

284 Glimpses of California

said to be the handsomest squaw ever seen in Oregon.
In those days white men in wildernesses thought it
small shame, if any, to take Indian women to live
with them as wives, and Lucy was much sought and
wooed. But she seems to have had uncommon vir-
tue or coldness, for she resisted all such approaches
for a long time.

Finally, a man named Pomeroy appeared ; and, as
Lucy said afterward, as soon as she looked at him,
she knew he was her "turn tum man," and she must
go with him. He had a small sloop, and Lucy
became its mate. They two alone ran it for several
years up and down the river. He established a little
trading-post, and Lucy always took charge of that
when he went to buy goods. When gold was dis-
covered at Ringgold Bar, Lucy went there, worked
with a rocker like a man, and washed out hundreds
of dollars' worth of gold, all which she gave to
Pomeroy. With it he built a fine schooner and
enlarged his business, the faithful Lucy working
always at his side and bidding. At last, after eight
or ten years, he grew weary of her and of the coun-
try, and made up his mind to go to California. But
he had not the heart to tell Lucy he meant to leave
her. The pilot who told me this story was at that
time captain of a schooner on the river. Pomeroy
came to him one day, and asked him to move Lucy
and her effects down to Columbus. He said he had
told her that she must go and live there with her
relatives, while he went to California and looked

Chance Days in Oregon 285

about, and then he would send for her. The poor
creature, who had no idea of treachery, came on
board cheerfully and willingly, and he set her off at
Columbus. This was in the early spring. Week
after week, month after month, whenever his schooner
stopped there, Lucy was on the shore, asking if he
had heard from Pomeroy. For a long time, he said,
he could n't bear to tell her. At last he did; but she
would not believe him. Winter came on. She had
got a few boards together and built herself a sort
of hut, near a house where lived an eccentric old
bachelor, who finally took compassion on her, and to
save her from freezing let her come into his shanty
to sleep. He was a mysterious old man, a recluse,
with a morbid aversion to women ; and at the outset
it was a great struggle for him to let even an Indian
woman cross his threshold. But little by little Lucy
won her way: first she washed the dishes; then she
would timidly help at the cooking. Faithful, patient,
unpresuming, at last she grew to be really the old
man's housekeeper as well as servant. He lost his
health, and became blind. Lucy took care of him
till he died, and followed him to the grave, his only
mourner, — the only human being in the country
with whom he had any tie. He left her his little
house and a few hundred dollars, — all he had ; and
there she is still, alone, making out to live by doing
whatever work she can find in the neighborhood.
Everybody respects her; she is known as "Lucy" ^
up and down the river. " I did my best to hire her

286 Glimpses of California

to come and keep house for my wife, last year," said
the pilot. " I 'd rather have her for nurse or cook
than any white woman in Oregon. But she would n't
come. I don't know as she 's done looking for Pome-
roy to come back yet, and she 's going to stay just
where he left her. She never misses a time, waving
to me, when she knows what boat I 'm on; and there
is n't much going on on the river she don't know."

It was dusk when the pilot finished telling Lucy's
story. We were shooting along through wild pas-
sages of water called Hell Gate, just above the
Dalles. In the dim light the basaltic columnar cliffs
looked like grooved ebony. One of the pinnacles
has a strange resemblance to the figure of an Indian.
It is called the Chief, and the semblance is startling,
— a colossal figure, with a plume-crowned head,
turned as if gazing backward over the shoulder; the
attitude stately, the drapery graceful, and the whole
expression one of profound and dignified sorrow. It
seemed a strangely fitting emphasis to the story of
the faithful Indian woman.

It was near midnight when we passed the Dalles.
Our train was late, and dashed on at its swiftest.
Fitful light came from a wisp of a new moon and one
star ; they seemed tossing in a tumultuous sea of dark
clouds. In this glimmering darkness the lava walls
and ridges stood up, inky black; the foaming water
looked like molten steel, the whole region more
ghastly and terrible than before.

There is a village of three thousand inhabitants at

Chance Days in Oregon 287

the Dalles. The houses are set among lava hillocks
and ridges. The fields seemed bubbled with lava,
their blackened surfaces stippled in with yellow and
brown. High up above are wheat-fields in clearings,
reaching to the sky-line of the hills. Great slopes of
crumbling and disintegrating lava rock spread superb
purple and slate colors between the greens of forests
and wheat-fields. It is one of the memorable pic-
tures on the Columbia.

To go both up and down a river is a good deal like
spending a summer and a winter in a place, so great
difference does it make when right hand and left shift
sides, and everything is seen from a new stand-point.

The Columbia River scenery is taken at its best
going up, especially the gradual crescendo of the
Cascade Mountain region, which is far tamer entered
from above. But we had a compensation in the
clearer sky and lifted clouds, which gave us the more
distant snow-peaks in all their glory; and our run
down from the Dalles to Portland was the best day
of our three on the river. Our steamer was steered
by hydraulic pressure ; and it was a wonderful thing
to sit in the pilot-house and see the slight touch of a
finger on the shining lever sway the great boat in a
second. A baby's hand is strong enough to steer the
largest steamboat by this instrument. It could turn
the boat, the captain said, in a maelstrom, where four
men together could not budge the rudder-wheel.

The history of the Columbia River navigation
would make by itself an interesting chapter. It

288 Glimpses of California

dates back to 1792, when a Boston ship and a Boston
captain first sailed up the river. A curious bit of
history in regard to that ship is to be found in the
archives of the old Spanish government in California.
Whenever a royal decree was issued in Madrid in
regard to the Indies or New Spain, a copy of it was
sent to every viceroy in the Spanish Dominions ; he
communicated it to his next subordinate, who in turn
sent it to all the governors, and so on, till the decree
reached every corner of the king's provinces. In
1789 there was sent from Madrid, by ship to Mexico,
and thence by courier to California, and by Fages,
the California governor, to every port in California,
the following order: —

" Whenever there may arrive at the port of San Fran-
cisco a ship named the * Columbia, ' said to belong to
General Washington of the American States, commanded
by John Kendrick, which sailed from Boston in 1787,
bound on a voyage of discovery to the Russian settle-
ments on the northern coast of the peninsula, you will
cause said vessel to be examined with caution and deli-
cacy, using for this purpose a small boat which you have
in your possession.''

Two months after this order was promulgated in
the Santa Barbara presidio, Captain Gray, of the ship
"Washington," and Captain Kendrick of the ship
"Columbia," changed ships in Wickmanish harbor.
Captain Gray took the "Columbia" to China, and
did not sail into San Francisco harbor at all, whereby
he escaped being " examined with caution and deli-

Chance Days in Oregon 289

cacy" by the small boat in possession of the San
Francisco garrison. Not till the 11th of May, 1792,
did he return and sail up the Columbia River, then
called the Oregon. He renamed it, for his ship,
"Columbia's River;" but the possessive was soon
dropped.

When one looks at the crowded rows of steamboats
at the Portland wharves now, it is hard to realize
that it is only thirty-two years since the first one was
launched there. Two were built and launched in
one year, the "Columbia" and the "Lot Whitcomb."
The "Lot Whitcomb" was launched on Christmas
Day; there were three days' feasting and dancing,
and people gathered from all parts of the Territory
to celebrate the occasion.

It is also hard to realize, when standing on the
Portland wharves, that it is less than fifty years
since there were angry discussions in the United
States Congress as to whether or not it were worth
while to obtain Oregon as a possession, and in the
Eastern States manuals were being freely distributed,
bearing such titles as this : " A general circular to all
persons of good character wishing to emigrate to the
Oregon Territory." Even those statesmen who were
most earnest in favor of the securing of Oregon did
not perceive the true nature of its value. One of
Benton's most enthusiastic predictions was that an
" emporium of Asiatic commerce " would be situated
at the mouth of the Columbia, and that "a stream
of Asiatic trade would pour into the valley of the

290 Glimpses of California

Mississippi through the channel of Oregon." But
the future of Oregon and Washington rests not on
any transmission of the riches of other countries,
however important an element in their prosperity
that may ultimately become. Their true riches are
their own and inalienable. They are to be among
the great feeders of the earth. Gold and silver
values are unsteady and capricious; intrigues can
overthrow them ; markets can be glutted, and mines
fail ; but bread the nations of the earth must have.
The bread-yielder controls the situation always.
Given a soil which can grow wheat year after year
with no apparent fatigue or exhaustion, a climate
where rains never fail and seed-time and harvest are
uniformly certain, and conditions are created under
which the future success and wealth of a country
may be predicted just as surely as the movements of
the planets in the heavens.

There are three great valleys in western Oregon,
— the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue
River. The Willamette is the largest, being sixty
miles long by one hundred and fifty wide. The
Umpqua and Rogue River together contain over a
million of acres. These valleys are natural gardens ;
fertile to luxuriance, and watered by all the west-
ward drainage of the great Cascade Range, the
Andes of North America, a continuation of the
Sierra Nevada. The Coast Range Mountains lie
west of these valleys, breaking, but not shutting out,
the influence of the sea air and fogs. This valley

Chance Days in Oregon 291

region between these two ranges contains less than a
third of the area of Washington and Oregon. The
country east of the Cascade Mountains is no less
fertile, but has a drier climate, colder winters, and
hotter summers. Its elevation is from two to four
thousand feet, — probably the very best elevations for
health. A comparison of statistics of yearly death-
rates cannot be made with absolute fairness between
old and thick-settled and new and sparsely settled
countries. Allowance must be made for the prob-
ably superior health and strength of the men and
women who have had the youth" and energy to go
forward as pioneers. But, making all due allowance
for these, there still remains difference enough to
startle one between the death-rates in some of the
Atlantic States and in these infant empires of the
New Northwest. The yearly death-rate in Massa-
chusetts is one out of fifty -seven; in Vermont one
out of ninety -seven ; in Oregon one out of one hun-
dred and seventy-two ; and in Washington Territory
one out of two hundred and twenty-eight.

As we glided slowly to anchorage in Portland
harbor, five dazzling snow-white peaks were in sight
on the horizon, — Mount Hood, of peerless shape,
strong as if it were a bulwark of the very heavens
themselves, yet graceful and sharp-cut as Egypt's
pyramids; St. Helen's, a little lower, yet looking
higher, with the marvellous curves of its slender
shining cone, bent on and seemingly into the sky,
like an intaglio of ice cut in the blue ; miles away, in

292 Glimpses of California

the farthest north and east horizons, Mounts Tacoma
and Adams and Baker, all gleaming white, and all
seeming to uphold the skies.

These eternal, unalterable snow-peaks will be as
eternal and unalterable factors in the history of the
country as in its beauty to the eye. Their value will
not come under any head of things reckonable by
census, statistics, or computation, but it will be none
the less real for that: it will be an element in the
nature and character of every man and woman bom
within sight of the radiant splendor; and it will be
strange if it does not ultimately develop, in the
empire of this New Northwest, a local patriotism and
passionate loyalty to soil as strong and lasting as that '
which has made generations of Swiss mountaineers
ready to brave death for a sight of their mountains.

■ I

STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

CECIL H. GREEN LIBRARY

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305-6004

(415) 723-1493

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